The winners of the design competition for the Madrid Metropolitan Forest have been announced. Coordinated by the Vice-Mayor's Office and promoted by the Urban Development Department, the initiative invited architects to develop natural infrastructure to drive green growth and sustainable development in the city. Located in Madrid, Spain, the Forest will span 75 kilometers, contributing to the area's ecological rebalancing, carbon emission reductions, the fight against climate change, and the environmental and landscape restoration of degraded areas.
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Ideas Competition for the Design and Execution of a Metropolitan Forest in Madrid, Spain
The project aims to address the country's environmental and social challenges, aligning with the objectives of the Green Infrastructure and Biodiversity Plan for the City of Madrid (2018) and the Madrid + Natural Program. It will be a forest belt encircling the city of Madrid, utilizing green zones designated in urban planning—both existing and planned—to establish a green corridor. The project seeks the greatest possible ecological and spatial continuity, pursuing urban renaturalization and laying the groundwork for a new green infrastructure designed from a metropolitan perspective.
The competition was divided into five lots, defined by geographical continuity, land availability, and the opportunity to shape the peri-urban green corridor. Below, discover the winning projects for each lot in the words of their designers:
Lot 1. Northwest Ring. Between Natural Forests.
- Winning proposal: Tiempo de silencio
- Authors: LOLA Landscape Architects, Volterra Ecosystems, Burgos y Garrido Arquitectos, SBP Ingenieros Consultores, David Moreno Cano, Blank Exhinitions.
The north section of the Metropolitan Forest will connect the El Pardo, Valdelatas, and Casa de Campo forests, drawing on the river corridor of the Manzanares River and the areas of Valdegrulla and Valverde. Our project joins this vast system, bringing great beauty and a rich history. It is the most peaceful and harmonious landscape in Madrid. We propose an authentic and native forest; varied and diverse; dynamic and changing over time; powerful and unique; accessible on both large and small scales; urban and wild.
The city has grown through a continuous sequence of demolishing and building walls and fences. These boundaries still exist, now materialized in large-scale infrastructure that prevents the urban fabric and citizens from connecting with the city's geographical surroundings. The proposed project is a fundamental tool for transforming this reality. However, it does so by utilizing the rules of infrastructure. This green ring will be a new infrastructure—this time, a green one. We envision it as powerful as the single-purpose ring roads surrounding Madrid.
It features the metropolitan scale of the whole while remaining specific in each fragment, reflecting the unique characteristics of each site it occupies. Rather than a single project, we propose a system. It will be flexible and anticipatory, accommodating different projects, uses, and landscapes without losing its cohesion. It will establish a playing field with technical and instrumental guidelines that serve multiple stakeholders over time. It will be both pragmatic and visionary, designed with trust in the collective nature of the city, the value of public space as the best guarantor of equity, and the urgent need for global collaboration to fight climate change.
The proposed system does not aim to be a finished, complete project. Instead, it will be an open system that incorporates the passage of time as an essential element. It is conceived as a succession of different projects where citizen needs intersect with the requirements of native flora and fauna to thrive sustainably. It establishes connections and access routes from both inside and outside the city, spanning from the urban to the natural, taking shape primarily as an ecological and utility infrastructure.
Lot 2. Northeast Ring. Uniting Urban Parks
- Winning proposal: Efecto Mariposa
- Authors: Luis Climent Rosillo + María Navascués Abad + Luis Climent Soto + AR2V Ingeniería.
The urban space integrated into Lot 2 is highly consolidated by buildings and occupied by major transportation infrastructure. However, it contains elements of great environmental and landscape value, such as the southern edge of El Encinar de los Reyes, Valdebebas Park, Juan Carlos I Park, the Capricho Garden, the O’Donnell Green Wedge, Vicálvaro, or Valdebernardo Park. These are green spaces with strong individual identities, though currently connected almost exclusively to their immediate urban surroundings.
Intervention in this area must first focus on interconnecting these green spaces, while incorporating other ongoing or future initiatives, such as Cerro Almodóvar and the Nueva Centralidad del Este. This will substantially improve accessibility to green areas and encourage their metropolitan use.
The goal is to generate a green network or green infrastructure that integrates the parks into this relational system, overcoming their current isolation. Additionally, "idle" spaces created by existing infrastructure should be utilized; reclaiming and redeveloping them as woodland can provide clear environmental improvements and opportunities to expand the green network.
Furthermore, despite the heavy transformation of the target area, recoverable spaces for biodiversity conservation must be identified. This will involve introducing the most appropriate plant species, recovering the natural shape and conditions of the terrain, and enhancing ravines and valleys to reflect the fundamental features of the original landscape. The maintenance of the proposed forest will be low, as native species and localized systems will be selected, which should not require irrigation systems beyond occasional watering by water trucks during dry periods.
Lot 3. Southeast Ring. The Southeast Green Ring
- Winning proposal: A Flor de Yeso
- Authors: eslava y tejada arquitectos (Clara Eslava and Miguel Tejada, architects | concept, direction, and general coordination; Guillermo Perales, architect | project lead and graphic production; Elena Calleja, architect | imagery and graphic production; Guillermo Matamala, forestry engineer | botanical analysis, planting), Uxama ingeniería (Luis Plaza ICCP | civil engineering; Sara Plaza, architect | urban planning analysis; Joaquín Grijota, biologist | environmental analysis – GIS analysis – soil suitability; Daniel Fernández, biologist | biodiversity analysis), Gestión integral del Suelo (David Gistau , ICCP | civil engineering; Alberto Pérez, ICCP | utility networks analysis).
A flor de yeso seeks to establish roots in the arid soils that stretch along the city's expanding margins, ultimately overlooking the fertile valleys of the Manzanares and Jarama rivers. By showcasing the unique features of this territory—such as cliffs and gypsum outcrops, which remain unfamiliar to most locals—the project aims to draw poetry from the ground: a flower blooming from the dry, rough, and hard terrain. This concept celebrates its distinct beauty, fertility, and richness. The challenge lies in addressing three distinct issues through a single unified solution:
The environmental recovery of a territory completely fragmented by infrastructure and scarred by activities like informal settlements, landfills, and mining. Providing a transition from new urban developments to rural land, particularly toward the Southeast Regional Park, where real estate pressure threatens ecological values. The social integration of marginalized populations settled in this environment, whose presence is tied to its identity despite the informal nature of the settlements. Reclaiming these natural spaces must be approached in a socially sustainable way.
The metropolitan forest offers an opportunity to highlight a largely undiscovered territory rich in natural and cultural value: its topography, featuring extraordinary views of the Jarama and Manzanares valleys, unique geological formations, specific habitats, a riverbed that acts as an oasis, archaeological remains, well-preserved Civil War trenches, and the potential for the gradual restoration and integration of former landfills.
These elements merge into a large forested area hosting various development activities focused on environmental and social regeneration. These will include the sustainable use of natural resources, primarily for education, training, and research, as well as recreation and leisure.
Lot 4. South Ring. The Southern River Parks
- Winning proposal: Manantial Sur, Infraestructura regenerada
- Authors: aldayjover arquitectura y paisaje: Iñaki Alday, Margarita Jover, project director architects. Jesús Arcos, architect, Francisco Mesonero, landscape architect and agricultural technical engineer, project coordinators.
- Collaborators: ABM Consulting (Civil and hydraulic engineering), IRBIS (Environmental consulting), Paisaje Transversal (Urban planning and participation), Benedicto Gestión de Proyectos (Budget), BIS structures (Structures), Fernando Domingo (Surveying engineer), Sbda Saida Dalmau (renderings).
The southern area of Madrid along the Manzanares riverbed is dominated by infrastructure that has fragmented the territory. However, it is also a land of opportunity, rich in latent resources. Beyond water and ecological resources linked to its watercourses, it holds historical, agricultural, horticultural, archaeological, and social potential ready to be expanded and revived.
aldayjover shifted the discourse on the relationship between rivers and cities by designing some of the first floodable public spaces as hybrid hydraulic infrastructures in the late 1990s. In Manantial Sur within the Metropolitan Forest, aldayjover reconceptualizes the region's artificial hydrology, supplementing fresh water sources from the Sierra de Madrid with new water sources from wastewater treatment plants. This concept, originally developed for Delhi (the Yamuna River Project, with Pankaj Vir Gupta), will generate a new landscape for managing water and nature. It will create microclimates, promote healthy habits, and support a more equitable and democratic society based on the right to quality public space.
Manantial Sur is a proposal for social and ecological-landscape renewal. Social renewal restores pedestrian connectivity and establishes civic hubs. Ecological renewal fosters the conditions for the emergence of diverse flora and fauna, alongside a monumental forest supported by improved water resource management. The renewal of transport infrastructure stems from reimagining roads and rails as wide ecological corridors that integrate active mobility, forming an agroforestry and social mosaic.
Developed from a transdisciplinary perspective, aldayjover—in collaboration with ABM Consulting, IRBIS, Paisaje Transversal, Benedicto Gestión de Proyectos, BIS structures, and fdTOP—has led this proposal for Madrid's green belt, which will become the capital's first major metropolitan intervention to mitigate climate change. This forest is designed to address pressing social and ecological challenges, utilizing water as the driving force for both design and planning.
Lot 5. Southwest Ring. The Metropolitan Ring
- Winning proposal: Del manzanares al Guadarrama
- Authors: RUBIO Arquitectura, IRATI Proyectos, CLOTHOS Ingeniería y medio ambiente, FHECOR Ingeniería, GEO360 Topografía.
Among the five areas proposed for the Metropolitan Forest, the fifth closes the loop, establishing a green corridor between the Manzanares and Guadarrama rivers. The proposal seeks to correctly read the natural and artificial pre-existing elements of the site—the data imprinted on the landscape and cartography. Every place has its own history and memory. Based on the territorial features and the urban configuration of the intervention area, 3 landscape units or scopes of action are defined:
A. Conducting Field Operations. The Dehesa de los Carabancheles: To recover the memory of the lost dehesa (pastureland) of Carabancheles, currently occupied by military training grounds, we must understand the complex system that makes up the dehesa landscape. Tracing its historic paths, restoring the Meaques and Valchico riverbeds, and establishing the holm oak forest require testing and management strategies over time, defined here as field operations.
B. Pollinating Cuatro Vientos. The Cuatro Vientos Agroecological Park: Pollinating Cuatro Vientos is a strategy to transform the landscape of large infrastructure along the M-40 highway into a fertile environment for creating an agroecological park in southern Madrid.
C. Manufacturing the Forest. The Butarque Ecological Restoration Center: Located in the industrial area of the Villaverde ring and connecting with the environmental corridor of the Butarque stream. The industrial conversion of the decommissioned Arcelor factories will serve as a strategic hub to manage the ecological restoration processes of the Metropolitan Forest, creating a "landscape factory" and a benchmark landmark for Madrid's ecological transition.
For more information, visit the official Estrategia Urbana Madrid website.
This article was written by Belén Maiztegui. The translation is powered by AI.
