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Blending ambitious new projects with its artistic sensibility, Madrid is a winner as a meeting and convention destination.
Rob Hard looks forward to meetings in Madrid. It’s not because of the city’s avenues of art galleries and tapas bars, its blend of high technology and Renaissance architecture, or even the fact that it enjoys warm, sunny weather for most of the year. It’s because the Spanish capital makes it so easy to incorporate those elements into the perfect meeting.“Every city has its museums, and Madrid has some of the best. But it’s what you do with that museum as part of your meeting experience that matters,” said Hard, president of RH Communications, Inc., a Chicago marketing and event management firm. “If you have even an inkling of an idea that you’d like to host an event in one of these special places, contact them. Most are very flexible about hosting events on their property.”
What Hard loves about Madrid — and what draws 700,000 attendees to the 4,000 conventions and meetings hosted by Spain’s capital each year — is its marriage of modern convenience and sophisticated service with an artistic and aesthetic heritage available nowhere else in the world. The city is famous for combining the old and the new in creative ways. Its latest gastronomic trend, for example — “author cuisine” — approaches traditional recipes from an avant-garde perspective, adding new flavors, raw materials and an elegant presentation.
The same is true of the city’s newest venue, the $96 million CaixaForum Madrid, which opened in February. Designers Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron transformed an 1899 cast-iron and brick power station into a seven-story, 100,000-square-foot venue for conferences, art exhibitions, concerts and other events. While “la Caixa,” Spain’s largest corporate foundation, retained the power plant’s historic charm, its designers added unique touches, including a vertical garden of more than 15,000 plants and three huge pillars that allow the bulk of the building’s structure to float over a new, 27,000-square-foot public forum.
Madrid’s “best of all worlds” approach has made the city a leading contender for the 2016 Olympic Games. While the Olympic Committee won’t announce its decision until October, it has ranked Madrid first in seven of 11 categories, including general infrastructure, environment, transportation infrastructure, experience and “overall project and legacy.” In the meantime, the city is converting one of its most historic sports venues, the former Real Madrid Sports City, into the International Convention Centre. When it opens in 2011, the new center will be Spain’s largest, accommodating up to 3,500 people in a 15-acre urban park that will include the city’s four tallest skyscrapers. At the heart of the campus, the new Madrid Convention Centre will provide six stories and five underground levels of meeting and convention space in an environmentally friendly building lit by solar panels and cooled by collected rainwater.
While the city has been the capital of Spain since 1516 (when King Philip II moved his court here from Seville), an ambitious new project places it at the heart of the country. By 2010, the Spanish government hopes to complete 4,350 miles of high-speed track for its Alta Velocidad Española train system, putting every provincial capital within four hours of Madrid. Recent improvements to the AVE have already cut transit time from Madrid to Segovia from two hours to half an hour, and from Madrid to Malaga from four hours to two and a half. The completed system — begun as part of the 1992 World’s Fair and now considered a model for a proposed high-speed rail network in the United States — will allow trains to travel at 199 mph, sometimes reaching speeds of 219 mph.
“As high-speed train options increase, it’s possible to go from one city ce
nter location in Spain to another within a relatively short time,” said RH Communications’ Rob Hard. “The difference to me is that I don’t have to plan for the extra security line time required at airports. Plus, the AVE has different classes of seats, so it’s a very pleasant experience.”
