The Guadarramas, as a result of their proximity to high population centres of cultural and educational importance, was one of the first areas of Spain where natural resources and the study of nature came to be valued, both for economic and educational reasons. This culminated in the establishment of the "Institución Libre de Enseñanza" (Free Institution of Education) in 1876, which advocated an assimilation into Madrid's cultural values of the nearby mountain range's natural beauty. By the 1920s, there was a call to declare the entire range a protected national park; a notion that is still unrealized but has support today.