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Best Places to Visit guide

Top 7 locations in Comunidad de Madrid

Asaf Lev-Ari

Live update: Updated May 11, 2022

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1. Aranjuez Cultural Landscape

Pl. de Parejas, s/n, 28300 Aranjuez, Madrid, Spain

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Asaf Lev-Ari

The Aranjuez cultural landscape is an entity of complex relationships: between nature and human activity, between sinuous watercourses and geometric landscape design, between the rural and the urban, between forest landscape and the delicately modulated architecture of its palatial buildings. Three hundred years of royal attention to the development and care of this landscape have seen it express an evolution of concepts from humanism and political centralization, to characteristics such as those found in its 18th century French-style Baroque garden, to the urban lifestyle which developed alongside the sciences of plant acclimatization and stock-breeding during the Age of Enlightenment.

ALSO FEATURED IN:Top 50 locations in Spain

2. Monastery and Site of the Escurial, Madrid

Av. de la Constitución, 52, 28280 El Escorial, Madrid, Spain

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Asaf Lev-Ari

Built at the end of the 16th century on a plan in the form of a grill, the instrument of the martyrdom of St Lawrence, the Escurial Monastery stands in an exceptionally beautiful site in Castile. Its austere architecture, a break with previous styles, had a considerable influence on Spanish architecture for more than half a century. It was the retreat of a mystic king and became, in the last years of Philip II's reign, the centre of the greatest political power of the time.

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3. University and Historic Precinct of Alcalá de Henares

C. Mayor, 91A, 28801 Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain

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Asaf Lev-Ari

Founded by Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros in the early 16th century, Alcalá de Henares was the world's first planned university city. It was the original model for the Civitas Dei (City of God), the ideal urban community which Spanish missionaries brought to the Americas. It also served as a model for universities in Europe and elsewhere.

ALSO FEATURED IN:Top 50 locations in Spain