Rio and Cabarras, two Spanish historians, speak of the bad odours and the dirt of Madrid in the seventeenth century. This reproach was, however, removed in the time of Henry Swinburne, an intelligent traveller, who visited the city in 1776. “The appearance of Madrid,” writes Swinburne, “is grand and lively; noble streets, good houses, and excellent pavement, as clean as it was once dirty.” In earlier days it was not thought necessary to wash the thoroughfares, because the purity of the air was an effective antidote to the evil of the filth and the smells. Rio, for example, advances the opinion that the invigorating mountain breezes are a sufficient purification.
The clear quality of the Madrid sunshine is a compensation for the treachery of its winds. There are but few sunless days. “The sky at Madrid is almost always clear and serene,” wrote Laborde, in 1809. The heights of the Guadarrama are too far from the city to throw their shade upon it, and the brilliant sunlight pours down and floods the streets and squares, and penetrates every dwelling. Looking upon the wide, rolling, hillocky country from the outskirts of the city, you have a marvellous vista, full of colour, glow, and the grandeur of huge sunlight spaces. The sky is almost perennially deep blue; but at times there are vast masses of purple cloud above the horizon, whose passing shadow produces changing effects of light and darkness upon the far-stretching landscape, and adds a sternness to the sierra.
For a long period this part of Castile was ravaged by the fellers of trees. The farmers aimed besides at the extinction of all kinds of birds, under the delusion that every bird is harmful to crops; and in the conduct of this warfare the axe was laid to the roots of millions of trees, so that no harbour for small birds might remain. This clearing of the forests destroyed the natural barriers against icy winds, deprived the land of all shade, made deserts in place of groves, and affected the climate and rainfall. A wiser policy was instituted in later years, and now a number of large plantations have grown up in the environs of the town, and the once denuded hillocks and bare gullies are here and there clothed with shady coppices. For the rest, the herbage of these grey uplands yields moderate pasturage for sheep in summer.