Atocha Station Tropical Garden (Jardín Tropical de Atocha)

The station that stood on the site in the mid-nineteenth century was destroyed by fire on the night of 24 to 25 February 1864. Its successor, the Mediodía (South) station, was the subject of a project approved on 7 February 1883 and given royal approval in March 1890. The architect Alberto de Palacio y Elissague led the design with the engineer Saint-James, who drew on the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. The ironwork was supplied by a Belgian firm, the Société Anonyme de Construction et des Ateliers de Willebroeck. Construction took four years and cost some 2,370,000 pesetas, and the station opened in 1892.

A century later, between 1985 and 1992, Rafael Moneo reorganised the whole Atocha rail complex. The old shed lost its tracks and platforms and became a concourse leading to the new rail facilities. A tropical garden was planted there and opened in 1992, when the station was refitted to receive the AVE high-speed train.

The garden is now part of the renovation of the historic shed and its approaches entrusted to Adif Alta Velocidad. In November 2025 the project entered its final phase, which includes the adaptation of the tropical garden; Madrid's tourist office lists the garden as temporarily closed for works, with no published reopening date.

The 1892 shed is a single great nave 152 m long, spanned in one 48 m arch and rising 27 m. Its iron frame follows a rigid system known as the De Dion system; it was made in Belgium and assembled in Madrid. The masonry combines bricks from Murcia, Guadalajara and Ariza, in the province of Zaragoza, with terracotta ornament, while the iron-and-glass roof turns the nave into one vast, light-filled glasshouse.

In converting the building, Rafael Moneo kept the nineteenth-century envelope and turned the floor of the old shed into a planted concourse that travellers cross between beds and ponds. The garden covers about 4,000 m². The temperature is held between 22 and 24 °C and the humidity between 60 and 70 per cent, conditions close to those of a tropical glasshouse, inside a space that remains first and foremost a thoroughfare.

Published inventories do not agree. The Spanish Wikipedia counts more than 7,200 plants belonging to 260 species, whereas Madrid's tourist office describes over a hundred species from the Americas, Asia and Australia, with some 70 palms of different sizes, fifteen beds of shrubs and around a thousand specimens of other species. Both sources agree on the main point: a dense planting, dominated by palms, that climbs towards the glass roof.

The plants mentioned include the traveller's tree (Ravenala madagascariensis), cacao, coffee, rubber trees and breadfruit. Ponds are scattered through the garden. The largest became a refuge for exotic animals abandoned by their owners, among them Florida turtles, spiny softshell turtles (Apalone spinifera) and Plecostomus catfish.

The garden fills the old shed of Madrid-Puerta de Atocha-Almudena Grandes station, on the Glorieta de Carlos V side. In normal times it can be walked freely from the concourse in about half an hour and fits easily between two trains. During the renovation led by Adif, the tourist office lists it as temporarily closed, so it is wise to check its situation before going.

A visit pairs naturally with the Real Jardín Botánico, whose glasshouses lie about 500 m to the north along the Paseo del Prado, and with the museums of the Prado-Atocha axis, starting with the Reina Sofía museum, close to the station.