Madrid is quite unique:
• No river
• Very recent
• Tiny when it became a capital
So why?
These are the rivers of other big European cities & capitals: huge and calm. Why?
Because rivers allowed:
• Drinking
• Irrigation ➡️ food ➡️ population
• Trade: Transport is much cheaper than on roads, so much more trade and wealth
You can see the importance of rivers by the population density in France: it follows the course of rivers! You can tell the confluence of big rivers because they host the biggest population centers—natural markets to trade across the meeting rivers
Compare with Madrid's main river
Do you know its name? No, because it's puny
It's weak. An affront on capital rivers. A feeble stream
Low bridges. Full of sandbars. Why? No point in clearing them. The only thing that navigates the Manzanares is its inferiority complex
If Madrid had been blessed with a huge river, it would have been a huge city in ancient times. But no. In fact, it's a very recent city
Compare its founding with that of other capitals of countries occupied by the Romans. Most are 2k+ y old. Madrid? Barely 1k y old
When it was selected as capital, it wasn't the 1st, or the 2nd, or even the 3rd biggest city in Spain. It was the 10th! Barely over 10k people. A small town!
Back then, most capitals were the biggest, most powerful, best placed city. Why not in Spain?
Blame this guy
Philip II of Spain—who also gave name to the Philippines. Until the 1560s, Spain had an itinerant court. He wanted to fix it in a city. Where?
He had to deal with 2 realities. One was his empire: He needed a capital that was close enough to everything. That was Spain, which was also among the richest parts of his empire.
So he wanted a capital in Spain
This is Spain
What do you notice?
It's criss-crossed with mountain ranges. This has serious consequences
• Spain has a lot of rivers separated from each other by these mountain ranges. This means they're smaller than its Northern Europe equivalents
• Because they go through all these mountains, they aren't navigable*. They couldn't be used much for trade
So no big central city
It also means there are few plains. The few on the coast all developed big populations since Roman times. Barcelona, Valencia, Huelva, Cadiz... All predate the Roman!
This means Spain was (and is) made of islands of coastal population separated by mountains
Another thing to notice: It's surrounded by coasts, but each coast had its own pbms:
• Mediterranean: Deal with the colonies in Italy / Greece and fend off Muslim attacks
• Southwest: Deal with Spain's American colonies
• North: Deal with British attacks & Flemish colonies
Then there are the 2 central plateaux ("mesetas") and the Ebro Valley.
The king had to find a place that connected them all as best as possible.
I mentioned before the king had an itinerant court until then. This was the reason: Too many disconnected power centers
So what was the best connected place in the country at the time?
The red areas in the map below. Noticve they include Madrid and Toledo—which was one of the biggest and most powerful cities at the time.
So why not Toledo as a capital?
This is Toledo. Majestic, on a hill surrounded by the Tajo river
But:
• Streets are small, which is not ideal for travel with your court—and your personal guard
• You can’t grow the city much further
• You can’t determine its urbanism
And Philip II wanted to build. He had visited his Italian and Flemish possessions and wanted to bring its architecture. This is why he built the Escorial Palace
He wanted to do the same with his new capital
Madrid had another benefit: It had a power void.
Toledo and Valladolid had noble and religious leaders who could challenge the king
Not Madrid, which was smaller and had recently lost many nobles due to a failed revolt.
The king had confiscated their lands in Madrid
Madrid had other small benefits:
• Built on a defensible position
• Reliable water from the mountain range
• Air from the mountains (back then, they thought they were the cure against recurring epidemics)
• Forests for hunting
So Philip II chose Madrid in 1561
Once capital, the entire communications network had to be rewired to make Madrid more central. That was the point of the capital after all—allow easy access to all the territory.
Notice how so many Roman road paths have been conserved, but the central part is completely new
This happened over the centuries
More recently, we can see the roads plan of 1926, the highways plan of 1985, the current railroads... Most cross in Madrid
The goal of Madrid's airport was to do the same connecting Spain with the world. It's now the 5th busiest airport in Europe
So Madrid is unique, because its geography had very little to offer—except it was central
But that centrality made it a capital
That centrality gave it infrastructure
That infrastructure made it the most connected place in Spain, hence the biggest market, hence the biggest city
If you want to know more, I have an upcoming article on Madrid. Sign up to the free newsletter to receive it.
And follow me for more threads like that! One every week/month unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/subscribe
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You think housing prices will keep going up because you've seen it all your life. But this is a historic anomaly that is likely to reverse soon: Prices might start shrinking in many places.
This thread is the case against investing in housing:
Our perception of real estate prices is extremely biased.
Most ppl alive today have only experienced them since WW2, but that's a completely anomalous period!
Prices before did not grow as much. Here are real prices for 14 countries
What happened?
Supply and demand
The last 80 years have seen a growth of housing demand never seen before. At the same time, supply has been shrinking consistently. These trends are all reverting now. Let's look at them in detail:
Why do Jamaicans speak English, when most of its neighboring countries don’t?
Why was the pirate capital there?
Why is it underwater now?
Why did pirates drink rum?
Why are most Jamaicans black?
This map of shipping lanes today gives you a hint:
Jamaica is in the middle of all these shipping lanes, but isn't a major shipping hub today
This is not new: Back in Spanish colonial times, Jamaica was not in the main trade routes either
Spain's main goods were silver from Mexico and Peru and luxury goods from China
Spaniards gathered them in Panama, Portobello, Cartagena, and Veracruz
Ships arrived from Spain to Puerto Rico and left via Habana (Cuba)
Jamaica was not a main port
Why?
This machine makes fuel from thin air
It's carbon neutral
And it does this at record-low costs
Energy and the environment will look completely different in 10 years
Here's why: 🧵
The problem with fossil fuels today is not that we burn them, it's where they come from: They had been locked in the ground for millions of years and now they're back in the atmosphere. The pbm is the "fossil", not the "fuels"
If we make fuels out of thin air, we can burn them
How can we do it?
Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4)
You just need some energy to force some carbon (C) to bing to hydrogen (H)
Carbon can come from air (CO2)
Hydrogen can come from water (H2O)
The energy can come from the sun (solar panels)
This video of the Rock of Gibraltar gives an intuition for why some areas of the world have deserts next to rainforests
What's happening here?
How can you use that to predict where there will be deserts or rainforests?🧵
Look at the map below: In some places, deserts and lush forests are side by side. Why?
The mountain chains between them
The effect is called the Rain Shadow:
• Air comes wet from the sea
• As it hits mountains, it goes up
• Higher altitudes are cooler, so the air cools
• That condenses water (like the droplets on you Coke glass)
• Rain falls
• Air is dry past the mountains
Egyptian pyramids are not where they're supposed to be. Why?
Why is Cairo, the biggest African city, where it is today?
Alexandria?
Why do over 100M Egyptians live so densely clustered?
These questions all have the same answer. Look:
1st map: population density
2nd map: satellite
The "flower" is the inhabited part of Egypt, which is basically the Nile
It makes sense: outside of the Nile, Egypt is like the rest of the Sahara desert, an inhospitable hell for humans
Global warming is accelerating
There's only one thing we can do today to delay it before we burn, enough to solve the pbm: SO2 injection
Some ppl are squeamish about it but they shouldn't be. SO2 is so obviously the right solution that we should do it now. Here's why:
There is no way we can stop carbon emissions on time
The Earth is reaching 1.5ºC of warming, but carbon emissions are higher than ever, carried by emerging economies that won't stay poor just for the environment
Solar, wind, nuclear, batteries, electric vehicles... All of these will curb CO2 emissions soon, but not soon enough. They will take decades
And extracting CO2 from the atmosphere is very expensive: ~$100 per ton