Aranjuez, Spain

Aranjuez
Registered Sector: 
Aranjuez Cultural Landscape
Location and site: 
Situado al sur de la Comunidad de Madrid, junto a la confluencia de los ríos Tajo y Jarama.
Historical Function: 
Real Sitio y Villa, lugar de residencia de los Reyes y la Corte -especialmente en primavera- hasta finales del siglo XIX.
Administrative Status: 
Historical Reference: 
  • The Aranjuez cultural landscape is an entity of complex relationships: between nature and human activity, between sinuous watercourses and geometric landscape design, between the rural and the urban, between forest landscape and the delicately modulated architecture of its palatial buildings. Three hundred years of royal attention to the development and care of this landscape have seen it express an evolution of concepts from humanism and political centralization, to characteristics such as those found in its eighteenth-century French-style Baroque garden, to the urban lifestyle which developed alongside the sciences of plant acclimatization and stock-breeding during the Age of Enlightenment.
Urban Morphology: 
Registration Criteria: 
Criterion (ii) Aranjuez represents the coming together of diverse cultural influences to create a cultural landscape that had a formative influence on further developments in this field.

Criterion (iv) The complex designed cultural landscape of Aranjuez, derived from a variety of sources, marks a seminal stage in the development of landscape design.