ABSTRACT
The metropolitan area of Madrid has its origins in the fact that Madrid has been the state capital since the sixteenth century. Although as a whole the territory tends towards a high degree of functional integration, four important areas can be differentiated for explanatory purposes:
The urban core, which can be understood as the area of the historic city, known as the Casco Antiguo (Old Town), and the successive amplifications of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the M-30 ring road. It constitutes a compact and dense urban fabric of 41.7 km2 and 990,679 inhabitants (20 percent of the regional total), in which the major part of the capital’s functions and most important tertiary activities are concentrated.
The municipality of Madrid is understood to be the urban core and a first periphery area made up of neighborhoods, which were originally independent municipalities that with the passing of time have been swallowed up in the expansion of the city. It has an area of 605.8 km2 and 3,010,492 inhabitants (60.85 percent of the total).
The “metropolitan crown”, understood to be the 26 municipalities (apart from Madrid) closest to and functionally most integrated with the capital. In the main, they are included in the body of the metropolitan area of Madrid, which was created in 1963 and ended with the creation of the Autonomous Community. Its area is 1,336 km2 and it has a population of 1,582,077 (31.98 percent of the total).
The Community of Madrid coincides with the administrative limits of the province of the same name, which was established in 1833, covering an area of 8,027 km2. It constitutes one of the Autonomous Communities into which the state was organised territorially under the 1978 constitution. As a result it has institutions of self-government and a directly elected parliament. Its current population stands at 4,947,555 (12.7 percent of Spain’s total population).
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