España, capital París

This is the story of a journey, not without surprises, through the last three hundred years of the history of Spain. The author goes back 1561, when Madrid, then a modest city in the centre of the peninsular, was designated the permanent seat of the Habsburg Court. However, the true journey starts at the beginning of the 18th century, after the War of Succession, when Madrid once more became a political capital, and the hub of Spanish communication. The apotheosis of the new centralised State comes in recent decades, as Madrid also achieves the stuatus of an economic, and therefore, complete capital city. That is, it becomes the Paris of Spain, fulfilling a dream which has existed from the first Bourbon monarchs to the most famous of Spain's contemporary reformers.