A Palace Built from the Ashes

Royal Palace of Madrid and Almudena Cathedral at sunset

A Palace Built from the Ashes

On Christmas Eve 1734, a fire destroyed Madrid’s old Royal Alcázar. Philip V commissioned a new palace on the same site, replacing an inherited royal residence with an ambitious eighteenth-century building.

Construction began in 1738. The project passed from Filippo Juvarra to Giovanni Battista Sacchetti, and Charles III became the first monarch to live there in 1764. The Royal Palace we see today began with that break in the city’s history.

Almudena Cathedral facing the Royal Palace across Plaza de la Armería

A square, two different histories

Around the Plaza de la Armería, the Royal Palace and the Almudena Cathedral create a monumental dialogue. The cathedral in this view belongs to a much later chapter of Madrid; it should not be confused with the palace across the square.

Walking between them makes scale tangible: repeated windows, long façades, towers against the sky and an open foreground. The setting invites us to read the buildings together while noticing their different histories.

Bag and floral scarf overlooking the Sabatini Gardens and Royal Palace

The gardens that came later

North of the palace, the Sabatini Gardens add another layer. Created in the 1930s on the site of the former royal stables, they take their name from Francesco Sabatini, the architect of those stables.

Clipped hedges, sculpture and a reflecting pool extend the order of the façade into the landscape. In the evening light, pale stone warms against deep green, offering a quieter way to look at the palace.

Macarena in an embroidered navy dress outside Madrid’s Royal Palace

Proportion, surface and detail

For Macarena de Alba, the palace offers more than a sense of grandeur. Its rhythm of windows, sculpted surfaces and balanced proportions suggests ways of organising detail without losing the clarity of the whole.

Embroidery works at a different scale, but asks a similar question: how much ornament can a surface hold? Against the palace façade, Macarena’s embroidered navy dress brings that observation back to fabric, movement and the body.