Pozuelo de Alarcón
The name comes from water — pozos, wells — and even now, driving west out of Madrid through the pine forests that edge the Casa de Campo, there's a quality of air here that the city doesn't quite have. Pozuelo de Alarcón is the wealthiest municipality in Spain, a fact that announces itself in the wide, plane-tree-lined Avenida de Europa and in La Finca, the gated residential enclave where professional footballers live behind high hedges.
But the place runs deeper than its postcode. The Media City quarter, Ciudad de la Imagen, is where RTVE and Telemadrid produce their broadcasts; Fernando Higueras's post-conciliar brick church sits quietly in a residential street; and a fountain built in 1735 by Ventura Rodríguez still stands in Somosaguas.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to walk the pine-edged paths between Somosaguas and Monte del Pilar early in the morning, before the heat builds. They eat lunch late, somewhere along the Avenida de Europa, and take the Metro Ligero back into Madrid rather than driving — it runs every few minutes and skips the afternoon traffic entirely.
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How Pozuelo de Alarcón came to be
The territory first appears in a 1208 boundary document issued by Alfonso VIII, and its name has always pointed to the springs and wells that made it habitable on the dry Castilian plain. For centuries it was two small settlements, Pozuelo and Húmera, with two further hamlets — San Juan de Somosaguas and San Pedro de Meaque — that emptied out during the civil conflicts of the 14th century.
The modern name arrived in 1632, when a nobleman named Gabriel Ocaña de Alarcón bought the land from the crown and converted it from royal to señorial jurisdiction, attaching his surname in the process. A century later, the Enlightenment minister Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes summered here and funded four bridges over the Pozuelo stream. Then came the railway: Queen Isabel II inaugurated Pozuelo station in 1860, and a new nucleus of town grew around it. The real rupture came in the 1970s, when orchards and tanneries gave way to residential developments, and the Avenida de Europa expansion of the late 1980s roughly doubled the population.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are short, dry and very hot — July sees barely 6 mm of rain and temperatures regularly reach the low 30s. Winters are cold and partly cloudy, though the Sierra de Guadarrama to the northwest keeps Pozuelo a degree or two cooler than Madrid year-round. October is the wettest month; April and May offer the most agreeable conditions for walking.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.