Parque Valdebebas

Parque de Valdebebas forms the green and civic heart of one of Madrid’s largest contemporary urban expansions, set on the city’s northeastern edge beside Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport and the IFEMA fairgrounds. Conceived within a roughly 10-million-m² (about 1,000-hectare) urbanization area, Valdebebas was planned as a self-sufficient new district that could absorb Madrid’s growth while creating a strong public-realm identity tied to landscape. The master plan assigns about 2.5 million m² of buildable residential and tertiary (office/hotel/retail) program, structured around a major open-space system rather than treating parks as leftover parcels.

At the core of this system is the Parque Forestal de Valdebebas–Felipe VI, a vast woodland park of roughly 470–500 hectares—now one of the city’s largest “green lungs.” The park’s landscape concept is legible at multiple scales: from the air it reads as a single branching form, while on the ground it unfolds as a sequence of re-created Iberian ecosystems—pine woodlands, scrublands, and aromatic coastal-plateau communities—stitched together by lagoons, restored topography, and long-view promenades. A reclaimed-water irrigation network and extensive trail and bike circuits reinforce a low-impact, climate-responsive approach to stewardship and everyday use.

The wider Valdebebas district is organized as a mixed-use fabric of housing, offices, hotels, retail, and civic facilities, deliberately interwoven to avoid single-purpose zones and to keep streets active across the day. A web of mobility corridors—vehicular boulevards, shaded pedestrian spines, cycle paths, and green plazas—connects neighborhoods to the forest park and to regional infrastructure, making landscape the primary connector between daily life and the metropolitan edge.

On the district’s southeast flank, the Ciudad Real Madrid training campus occupies about 120 hectares, anchoring the expansion with a globally recognized sports institution while benefiting from the same connected open-space framework. Together, the park and master plan establish Valdebebas as a contemporary model for Madrid’s growth: a district where ecological restoration, public realm, and mixed-use urbanism evolve as one integrated landscape.