Historical Importance
The river Manzanares, although small and relatively unimportant geographically, has had a great historical importance due to its close relation to the city of Madrid. The city was founded by the Moors as a citadel overlooking the river in the ninth century.
The river is also featured in many paintings of the late 18th to early 19th-century painter Francisco de Goya, which show traditionally dressed Madrileños in activities like dancing or having picnics next to the river.
The Manzanares was also an important defence line for the Republican forces during the Siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War, and many bunkers can still be seen near the village of Perales del Río. The Bridge of the French, was of crucial importance because of its strategic location. There, nationalists forces were repeatedly repelled and denied access to Madrid’s city center.
Read more about this topic: Manzanares (river)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or importance:
“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects—making it possible ... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)