Short answers, pulled from the story.
Philip II set his court in Madrid in June 1561, installing it in the old alcázar, making the city the permanent seat of the Hispanic Monarchy. Its location at the geographic centre of Spain was a key factor, and the city served as capital continuously except for a brief period from 1601 to 1606 when the court moved to Valladolid.
The Golden Triangle of Art is a UNESCO World Heritage designation covering three major art museums along the Paseo del Prado: the Prado Museum, the Reina Sofía Museum, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. The Prado holds European art from the 12th to early 19th century, the Reina Sofía focuses on 20th-century art including Picasso's Guernica, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza fills the historical gaps left by the other two.
The exact origin of the name Madrid is unknown and no single theory fully explains its phonetic evolution. Leading explanations include a derivation from the Latin Matrice (meaning water stream), a Celtic root related to the word for ford, and the Arabic magrā meaning water stream.
On the 2nd of May 1808, a crowd gathered near the Royal Palace to protest the French attempt to remove the remaining Bourbon royal family to Bayonne. The protest became an uprising against French Imperial troops that spread across the city for hours, including a last stand at the Monteleón barracks. The brutal repression that followed led to a declaration of war calling all Spaniards to fight the French invaders.
La Movida was a cultural and musical movement that emerged in Madrid from the late 1970s through the 1980s following the end of the Francoist dictatorship. It flourished during the mayoral tenure of Enrique Tierno Galván of the PSOE party, who actively nurtured it, and made Madrid a reference point for artistic freedom after four decades of dictatorship.
Madrid had a population of over 3.4 million in the city proper in 2025, with a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.8 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union after Berlin, and its metropolitan area is the second-largest in the EU after Paris.