The remodeling work on the Puerta de Alcalá was completed this Monday with the removal of the last scaffolding after almost a year of interventions in different strategic places of the monument, which from now on will be periodically reviewed to carry out small maintenance tasks.
This was announced yesterday by the delegate of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the Madrid City Council, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, in a press conference at the Cibeles Palace in which she was accompanied by the head of the Restoration and Historical Heritage Service. of the General Directorate of Heritage, Cultural, Blanca Mora, and different positions involved in the work.
The intervention, which began in February of this same year, contemplated the structural consolidation of the sculptural groups, the replacement of the lead on the roof and the treatment of the stone on all the facades of the document.
The result has been satisfactory, highlighted the Culture delegate, who recalled in subsequent statements to the press that the traditional Christmas Nativity scene will be placed towards the end of the week.
“We hope that there will be Puerta de Alcalá for a while, but a program of more constant interventions, of more constant surveillance, has been prepared to avoid having to do work as complicated as those that have been done,” he commented.
Rivera explained that the monument is exposed to traffic and also to all the seeds that are expelled from the El Retiro park, a situation that cannot be remedied "in any way" and that also affects the conservation of the door.
The delegate has advanced that after the “learning” extracted from this work, the Madrid City Council will be able to replicate the way of preserving the work in other symbols of the capital, such as the Puerta de Toledo.
After determining what damage the monument suffered from previous studies, the Madrid City Council created an interdisciplinary team specialized in the treatment of stone materials, made up of more than 150 professionals, who reached a consensus on the state of conservation and the most appropriate criteria and methodologies to support the work.
The General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Madrid City Council thus had the collaboration of the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain, dependent on the Ministry of Culture, which on previous occasions has directed other similar projects such as the interventions in the cathedrals of Seville and Sigüenza or the Portico of Glory of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
