The Moncloa Palace is the presidential headquarters and the building where meetings of the Council of Ministers take place. We are more than used to seeing its northwest façade appear in the news, when a high-level meeting of the president with a Spanish or international political leader takes place, or whenever a new ministerial cabinet is presented.
The fact is that the current building only dates back to 1949, since the original, a jewel from the 17th century, was destroyed during the Civil War. But before focusing on that calamity, we can still travel a little further back in time and place ourselves in the Madrid of the Austrias, when the site that the palace and its gardens occupy today was an area of orchards and farmhouses.
The farm, which was first called Huerta de Fuente El Sol, was royal property until Philip III had to sell it to a captain to pay for the services provided to his father. From there it passed to Juana Manrique de Lara, Countess of Valencia, and from her to her daughter María de Lara, who married a certain Antonio Portocarrero.
Well, invested in 1617 by Philip III as Count of Monclova, it was Portocarrero who ended up giving the name to the plot. It comes from the deformation of the patronymic “Monclova” (from the Latin mons, “mountain”, and Clovius, for the Roman general who fought in the peninsula), which was the name of a castle that the Portocarrero had in Andalusia.
Now, the person who built the palace was Gaspar de Haro y Fernández de Córdoba (1629-1687), a rather wasteful man who, as ambassador to Rome and then viceroy of Naples, became famous for his arrogance. He had a notorious confrontation with Pope Innocent XI, who almost excommunicated him.
With the money earned from his stay in Naples, Gaspar de Haro bought the Moncloa and joined it to the adjacent property, the Huerta de Sora, which is where he had the palace built. Upon her death, her daughter inherited it, and when she was married to Francisco Álvarez de Toledo y Silva (1662-1739), 10th Duke of Alba, she changed family for the umpteenth time.
The credit for having converted the Moncloa into something more than an agricultural estate belongs to the Albas, especially to María Teresa de Silva (1762-1802; the one who painted Goya on the famous canvas), who ordered the house to be redesigned in a neoclassical sense. .
It remained in a rectangular, two-story building, decorated inside and out with frescoes and stuccos, hence it was known as “the painted house.” The only thing that broke the neoclassicist canon was the garden, which María Teresa “wildlife” somewhat, by breaking the French-style geometric shapes.
This is how it looked on the death of the duchess, in 1802, when King Charles IV bought it. As he was fond of hunting, he wanted to build a large preserve that would occupy the land between this farm, El Pardo and the Real Sitio de la Florida, a piece of land further south, on the Principe Pío mountain.
In this way, the Moncloa returned to the hands of the Crown, and from there it passed to those of the State, already in 1866. It was a voluntary transfer, but it cannot be ignored that revolutionary winds were blowing and it was advisable to appear austere.
Be that as it may, it seems that “if it belongs to everyone it belongs to no one”, because until 1918 the palace was treated with absolute neglect. When Francesc Cambó, then Minister of Public Works, remembered that it was there, the damage report that was presented to him could not have been more devastating.
Parts of the cornices, roofs, stuccos and other decorative elements had fallen off, there were dampness and cracks throughout the rooms, and the Louis XVI furniture had disappeared without the royal house or the ministry being able to explain its whereabouts.
Seeing this, Cambó commissioned Joaquín Ezquerra del Bayo, an art historian, and Javier Winthuysen Losada, who had gained notoriety designing public gardens, to undertake the restoration. With unusual historical rigor for the time, they spent ten years investigating the place's past, and only then did work begin. With all the publicity, in 1929 it reopened as a museum and public garden.
However, soon, a part of its wooded surroundings was going to serve as a plot for the University City. And with the outbreak of the Civil War, luck wanted the mansion to be in the middle of the front line.
The architect Juan Antonio González Cárceles, who investigated the history of what would later become the presidential palace, tells it in an article with extraordinary detail. On November 6, 1936, in a first attempt to take Madrid, five columns of General Varela were waiting to cross the Manzanares and break the defenses right near the Moncloa. However, a few hours before, some militiamen had fortuitously discovered the attack plans, and Vicente Rojo, head of the Republican General Staff, had concentrated his troops at that point.
What followed was a fierce fight. When in March, Franco decided that the capture of the capital had to wait, he had only captured some of the buildings of the University City and the Moncloa Palace. Theirs maintained their position throughout the war, like a rebellious “peninsula” inserted into Republican Madrid.
If the front line was where the faculties were, the Moncloa garden served as a camp. Not the palace, since the Republicans had made sure that it would not serve as a parapet. Through the use of artillery and, above all, mines, in 1938 they had already completely razed it.
González Cárceles transcribes a report from March 1938 in which it is explained that “the enemy” had managed to dig a tunnel to the cellar of the palace, exploding a 10-ton charge; 15 men from the 6th Tabor of Al Hoceima and the Toledo Battalion were buried.
The soldiers were forced to survive in the garden, pierced by a labyrinth of trenches. The fountain in the Alto garden, for example, was literally crossed by one of them, while the one in the Guiomar garden was converted into a laundry room.
After the end of the war, it was abandoned for ten years, like a pitiful cemetery, until the Government decided to rebuild it. In what would be its third or fourth life, it was going to serve as official accommodation for foreign dignitaries visiting Spain. Legend says that the decision was made after the bad experience with Eva Perón's visit, that she had to live with Carmen Polo in El Pardo, giving rise to countless gossip.
The project fell to a trusted architect of the regime, Diego Méndez, who at that time was director of the Valley of the Fallen works. Méndez chose to make a historicist building, with an eighteenth-century feel, but larger and more solemn than the previous one.
The list of figures who slept there in those years is phenomenal, including Saddam Hussein, Mohamed V of Morocco and American presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
It did not become the residence of the President of the Government until the advent of Adolfo Suárez. Until that moment, the headquarters of the Presidency – since 1914 and at the beginning of the Transition – had been in the Villamejor Palace, in the heart of Castellana, and the presidents used to come and go every day from their house, without an armored car (Suárez was the first to have one) and without more security than some national police.
Taking into account the experience of the assassination of Carrero Blanco and that ETA's terrorism was intensifying, it is surprising that it took so long to unite the presidential palace with the executive headquarters, all in a single isolated and well-protected space.
After Suárez's period, more buildings were added, both for government and for home services and security, including a bunker that connects the entire complex underground. Everything is new, except the Guiomar fountain, which is still there as a witness to the long and turbulent history of the Moncloa.
