El Estanque

The pond in front of you is older than the park that surrounds it. Philip IV had it dug beside the palace that once stood here, and the court amused itself on the water with replica galleys, with gondolas, and with staged spectacles that included full sea battles.

Almost nothing of that palace survives, because the Buen Retiro was largely lost during the war against Napoleon, when French troops turned the grounds into a fortress. Only in 1868 did the park pass to the city and open its gates to everyone.

The monument across the water came much later. José Grases Riera designed it for Alfonso XII, who reigned in the late nineteenth century, with a semicircular colonnade and the king on horseback, unveiled in 1922, so that anyone renting a little rowing boat today paddles along beneath his gaze.

We keep to the southern shore and follow the wide path on towards the south, until a building of red and yellow brick appears between the trees.