The park of El Capricho (Paseo Alameda de Osuna, 25) is one of those parks bucolic oases that green Madrid amidst so much traffic and blocks of apartments. This stately, historic garden keeps its biggest secret in plain sight: a Civil War bunker that can be visited a few times a year.
Twice a year, the City Council organizes Pasea Madrid, a series of free guided tours through emblematic areas of the city. The call is reminiscent of the virtual opening of the doors of a massive festival: it only takes a few minutes for the tickets to sell out. And today at 12h it opens the deadline for reservations.
The Capricho bunker is one of those spaces that make up Pasea Madrid. The quotas to visit it are exhausted quickly and the visit of this historic enclave is reserved for a privileged few: those who manage to reserve a place during the days enabled by the City Council. That is, Pasea Madrid and also Madrid Otra Mirada.
what’s a bunker doing in the middle of a park?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TusybnEyPbM
The bunker of the Jaca Position (code name of the Republican Army Headquarters in the Center) is one of the most important military constructions in Europe due to the good condition it is in. It is a space built about 15 meters underground and has about 2,000 square meters.
It was built in May 1937, when the Madrid Defense Board (General José Miaja, actually) decided that the Republican high command should leave the basements of the Ministry of Finance to move to a safer location.
The facilities of the Jardín del Capricho were used by the president of the Junta de Defensa de Madrid and the head of the Army of the Center, General Miaja, who had his residence and office in the palace until 1938. His post would later be occupied by Colonel Segismundo Casado López, who would maintain the headquarters of the Center in La Alameda until the end of the war.
A bunker open to the public
Various adaptations were made to the bunker, including a bomb shelter, renovations to the palace, ten light pavilions for troop accommodation and a communications pavilion.
One of the most spectacular curiosities of the visit is to know the utility of the tiles: they all have a different pattern. If the generator failed and the light went out, with the light of a match you looked at the ground to see where you were. All floors are different not for aesthetics but for a purely military function: to know where you were at any given moment.
The Madrid City Council decided to open the bunker for the first time to the public after its restoration on May 28, 2016 with a guided tour program. Attempts to get the El Capricho bunker opened to the public had been going on since the 1980s, but it was not until November 2012 when the Platform for the opening of the El Capricho bunker to the public began to see results.