Chamberí

Chamberí (District 7) is part of Madrid's central "almond" (almendra central) inside the M-30 ring road, with close to 150,000 residents. Its street grid was laid out under the Ensanche plan drafted by Carlos María de Castro and approved in 1860.

It has six wards: Gaztambide, Arapiles, Trafalgar, Almagro, Ríos Rosas and Vallehermoso.

• Almagro, the "Golden Triangle", has former palaces, embassies and institutions; other wards are more mixed, with large flats on the main boulevards and smaller homes on side streets.
• The district is known for its many modernist, neo-Gothic and neo-Mudéjar buildings and for Plaza de Olavide, a landscaped square at the heart of Trafalgar.
• Most streets are lined with trees. The disused Chamberí Metro station is now the Andén 0 Metro museum.
• The north-west, near the Ciudad Universitaria, has university campuses and many schools and clinics; the Official Language School Jesús Maestro is in Calle de Jesús Maestro.

• Metro: one of the best-connected districts, served by lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 10, with line 8 at Nuevos Ministerios.
• Cercanías at Nuevos Ministerios (C-2, C-3, C-4, C-7, C-8, C-10) and Recoletos (C-2, C-7, C-8, C-10) on its eastern edge.

Mostly flats in 19th- and early 20th-century apartment buildings, with larger, brighter homes on the boulevards. Asking rents are among the highest in Madrid.

Chamberí has many public and private schools and is close to the university area. Parks are scarce compared with outer districts, but former Canal de Isabel II water-supply sites have been opened as green and sports spaces.