Madrid City Council has added a public art viewer to its municipal Geoportal that locates close to a thousand artistic elements in the city’s streets, squares, parks and other urban spaces. The tool, presented on 6 November 2026, shows where each work is and its main characteristics. It also gives municipal services a shared base for protecting and conserving public art.

What the viewer contains

The viewer was added to the Geoportal by the Directorate General for Cultural Heritage and Urban Landscape of the Culture, Tourism and Sport department. It groups works into three categories:

  • monuments
  • murals
  • other artistic elements

The inventory includes sculptures, commemorative plaques, monuments and forms of urban art such as murals. Works such as the sculpture ‘La sirena varada’ by Eduardo Chillida can be found on the map.

The catalogue also covers works in privately owned spaces that have a presence in public space. Specific criteria were set for including them: a recognisable artistic intention, identifiable authorship or an individual integration into the urban setting. Murals have their own category, which includes both planned works and spontaneous graffiti expressions that later obtained heritage protection.

How residents can use it

Users can search for works by author name, district or date. This allows a person to explore the artistic heritage of a specific neighbourhood or find the works of a particular artist. The delegate for Culture, Tourism and Sport, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, said that Madrid is also a great open-air museum.

A working tool for municipal services

For municipal technical services, the viewer brings together information on the works and their locations. This shows how artistic heritage is distributed across neighbourhoods and supports monitoring and the planning of future interventions. Its data can be crossed with other Geoportal services, such as information on urban planning protection.

The viewer is the result of several years of identifying, cataloguing and georeferencing public art. Its aims are to spread knowledge of this heritage, to support its conservation, protection and enhancement, and to contribute to a more balanced territorial distribution of artworks. The viewer is available to all residents through the City Council’s Geoportal.