The Forest of Remembrance (Spanish: Bosque del Recuerdo), formerly known as the Forest of the Departed (Bosque de los Ausentes), is a memorial garden located in the park of El Retiro in Madrid, Spain that commemorates the 191 civilian victims of the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the special forces agent who died in the attacks on 11 March 2004. The seven suicide bombers subsequently killed themselves on 3 April 2004 while under siege by security forces in their apartment block.
The new name, Bosque del Recuerdo (Forest of Remembrance), was chosen after the survivors and the victims' families argued that those killed are for ever present and have never departed from their hearts.
The memorial comprises 192 olive trees and cypresses, one for each person killed, and is surrounded by a channel of water intended to symbolise life. The location is a hillock near the Atocha railway station, one of the sites of the atrocities.
Read more about Forest Of Remembrance: Inauguration
Famous quotes containing the words forest and/or remembrance:
“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine with bondage and restraint;
And with remembrance of the greater grief
To banish the less, I find my chief relief.”
—Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)