Madrid Madrid Madrid (, ) is the capital of Spain and the largest municipality in both the Community of Madrid and Spain as a whole. The city has almost 3.2 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.5 million. It is the third-largest city in the European Union (EU), smaller than only London and Berlin, and its monocentric metropolitan area is the third-largest in the EU, smaller only than those of London and Paris. The municipality covers . Madrid lies on the River Manzanares in the centre of both the country and the Community of Madrid (which comprises the
Madrid sector employs 18.1% of all employees. Madrid attracts about 8M tourists annually from other parts of Spain and from all over the world, exceeding even Barcelona. Spending by tourists in Madrid was estimated (2011) at €9,546.5M, or 7.7% of the city's GDP. The construction of transport infrastructure has been vital to maintain the economic position of Madrid. Travel to work and other local journeys use a high-capacity metropolitan road network and a well-used public transport system. In terms of longer-distance transport, Madrid is the central node of the system of "autovías" and of the high-speed rail network (AVE), which has