17 Oct 1919
King Alfonso XIII inaugurates the Metro
Alfonso XIII opens Line 1 between Puerta del Sol and Cuatro Caminos, 3.48 km with eight stations, built by the Compañía Metropolitano Alfonso XIII.
01Case study · WITAM · 2026Live
Madrid, from below
An interactive history of Metro de Madrid: a century of tunnels, stations and riders you can scrub through, on a 3D city, with today's trains running live.
Built by Blacknosaur, sponsored by WITAM.
- First train
- 1919
- Trips in 2025
- 736.9M
- Sections dated
- 316
- Sourced facts
- 24
01Why
A century nobody had seen whole
736,874,012 trips in 2025. Hardly anyone on board knows how the network got here
The history is real and well kept, just scattered: company ledgers from 1919, Royal Decrees, transparency spreadsheets, press releases, Wikipedia tables. You could read about a century of the Metro. You couldn't watch it grow.
So we built one place to watch it: free, public, sponsored by WITAM, about the thing everyone in Madrid uses and nobody sees whole.
1917 Digging under Puerta del SolUnknown photographer 
1919 Alfonso XIII opens Line 1Unknown photographer 
1937 Stations as air-raid sheltersAlfonso Sánchez Portela
02The idea
Every section, dated
Rebuild the network for any day since 1919 and let people scrub through it. This is the real data: each section draws in on its opening date.
1919
- Stations
- 0
- Kilometres
- 0.0
- Lines
- 0
03How
Sources before pixels
- 01
Sources before pixels
We started in the archives, not the editor: company records from 1919, decrees in the BOE, the transparency portal's station entries, press releases. Every figure on screen links to where it came from.
- 02
Every section, dated
Each stretch of track was traced from OpenStreetMap and given its opening day, so the network can be rebuilt for any date since 1919. Platforms carry their depth below the street.
- 03
A city to run it through
Three.js draws Madrid's buildings and runs the lines underneath as tubes, in the browser, on a laptop or a phone.
- 04
Live, honestly estimated
Metro publishes arrival times, not positions. A Cloudflare Worker batches the platform feeds, caches them for 30 seconds and infers where each train is. A timetable model fills the gaps, and the map says which is which.
- 05
Made to be shared
A poster and video maker runs on the visitor's device: eight styles, Story, Post or Square, with the caption ready to paste.
04What
What we shipped
A site in five views, from the archive to the train you can ride along with right now.
Scrub from 1917 to today. Every opening is dated, every number links to its source, with journeys per year alongside
Platform
Deco 1919
Riso
Neon
Blueprint
Swiss
05Facts
Next facts
A few of the sourced facts from the site, on a platform display. Each one links to where it came from.
- Busiest day ever2,819,020 trips on 28 Nov 2025 (Black Friday), excluding the 12 Mar 2004 demonstration day after the 11-M attacksSource
- Deepest stationCuatro Caminos, Line 6 platforms ~45–48 m below street level (Metro's 1989 inventory: 48 m)Source
- Drives on the leftTrains have run on the left since 1919, even after Madrid's road traffic switched to the right in 1924Source
- Unusual gauge1,445 mm track gaugeSource
- Only closed stationChamberí (1919–1966), now the Andén 0 museumSource
- Royal patronAlfonso XIII put up 1 million pesetas of his own money to help close the funding round; Banco de Vizcaya provided 4 millionSource
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Archive photos via Wikimedia Commons, public domain