HISPANIC HERITAGE
Aranjuez, the Spanish city that Washington, DC, 'copied'
Spanish researchers say the capital's original design was based on a historical city for the Spanish monarchy and U.N. World Heritage Site.
Royal Palace of Aranjuez, Spain
"Two Cities, One Blueprint." The U.S. Embassy in Madrid this month recalled a recently discovered imprint of Hispanic heritage in the country: Washington, D.C., appears to share urban design with the Spanish city of Aranjuez.
Despite the nearly 4,000 miles that separate the cities, researchers from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and the University of Almeria claim that the plan of the U.S. capital, founded in 1790, is a tracing of the Spanish royal site, which dates back to 1775.
Aranjuez was the spring residence of Spanish kings. With gardens, woods and orchards, the palace had everything necessary to house the monarchs... except space to house the court, which roamed from palace to palace at the monarchs' pace, as well as diplomats and troops. This last space was designed by Giacomo Bonavía and reflected by the military engineer Domingo de Aguirre in the plan "La Topografía del Real Sitio de Aranjuez" ("The Topography of the Royal Site of Aranjuez").
In the article "Similarities between L'Enfant's Urban Plan for Washington, D.C., and the Royal Site of Aranjuez, Spain," Spanish researchers claim that the Founding Fathers accessed Aguirre's drawings. This hypothesis was arrived at after one of them traveled to Washington and noticed the similarities.
How did the plans reach the United States? George Washington commissioned Thomas Jefferson to design the capital, and the latter turned to cartographer Pierre L'Enfant. In the article published in Urban Planning and Development, the scholars explore several hypotheses:
- L'Enfant studied at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, where he coincided with the designer of the plan of Aranjuez, Manuel S. Carmona. There he may have seen the plans. There is evidence, according to the authors, that the cartographer's father saw the plans.
- He also visited Paris in 1783, when he was already a candidate to erect the capital.
- Thomas Jefferson may also have seen it in his time as ambassador to the French capital. In his own sketch, according to the authors, the nation's later president placed the White House and the Capitol in a similar way as L'Enfant.
UNESCO World Heritage
"The Aranjuez cultural landscape is an entity of complex relationships: between nature and human activity, between sinuous watercourses and geometric landscape design, between the rural and the urban, between forest landscape and the delicately modulated architecture of its palatial buildings," assures the U.N. organization.
"Three hundred years of royal attention to the development and care of this landscape have seen it express an evolution of concepts from humanism and political centralization."
Similarities
"The influence of Versailles on L'Enfant's 1791 plan for the city of Washington, D.C., is well known," reads the academic article. "Less well known are the surprising similarities between Washington and the 'forma urbis' of the Royal Site of Aranjuez in Spain."
The two share the same layout of avenues and buildings and the same system of streets, as well as a similar inspiration in Versailles. The similarities, they say, are many. So many that one of the authors, Francisco Manzano, said in words shared by the University of Almeria:
"We discovered, affirmed and have managed to justify and publish that when the capital of the United States, Washington D.C., was created, after President George Washington commissioned its design to Thomas Jefferson and the latter to the cartographer Pierre L'Enfant, the city was based on the plans of Aranjuez."
For example, both were laid out in rectangular L-shaped spaces. At the ends of the L are the most emblematic buildings: in Aranjuez, the Royal Palace and the Church of San Antonio; in Washington, the Capitol and the White House.
There is a highly symbolic transposition, according to the researchers: the place in Aranjuez designated as the house of the king in Spain, the center of power, is not occupied in Washington by that of the president, i.e. the White House, but by that of the people, the Congress.
Emblematic buildings
Another similarity is the tangential location of the river (the Potomac in Washington, the Tagus in Aranjuez). One more: the location of capital avenues and the orchards of Aranjuez, as can be seen in an image of the study shared by the U.S. embassy in Madrid:
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