Madrid Rio Manzanares River Reclamation

Madrid Rio was a vast river reclamation project carried out 2003-11. The Manzanares River had been wrecked by highway engineering projects and the city council took an amazingly brave decision: to put the roads in tunnels and create a greenspace extending from the centre of Madrid into the countryside. The project was co-ordinated by West 8, a Dutch landcsape architecture firm. The eight components of the Madrid Rio project were: Salón de Pinos, Avenida de Portugal, Huerta de la Partida, Jardines del Puente de Segovia, Jardines del Puente de Toledo, Jardines de la Virgen del Puerto and Arganzuela Park. The Salón de Pinos is on top of the motorway tunnel and forms a green corridor. La Huerta de la Partida is a walled enclosure which, in the sixteenth century that supplied, fruit and vegetables to the Vargas Palace. It has been re-planted as an orchard. Puentes Cascara is a bridge and an iconic landmark. [ Note: the Madrid Rio river reclamation can be compared with the Cheonggyecheon River project in South Korea. ]

The official video is in Spanish but you can choose to have the captions translated into the language of your choice: