Aranjuez Cultural Landscape
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. 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, to characteristics such as those found in its 18th century French-style Baroque garden, to the urban lifestyle which developed alongside the sciences of plant acclimatization and stock-breeding during the Age of Enlightenment.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1044
Aranjuez Cultural Landscape is a series of intermeshed water, garden, agricultural and constructed landscapes at a strategic royal location between Madrid and Toledo. It includes the Palace, the Island Garden, the Great Historic Garden, the urban area and the Prince's Garden.
The Royal Palace of Aranjuez is a residence of the King of Spain. It was commissioned by Philip II in the 16th century as a private country palace. Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, who also designed El Escorial, were the architects. Extensive waterworks were used to both irrigate and protect the moist soil, and turn this swamp into a Garden of Eden.
The site was further enlarged during the reign of Ferdinand VI in the 18th century. A new, planned city and road system were built using geometric principles. Lines of trees are one of the most prominent characteristics of Aranjuez.
Its huge gardens, built to relieve its royal residents from the dust and drought of the Spanish meseta using the waters of the adjacent Tagus and Jarama rivers, are Spain's most important of the Habsburg period.
http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/aranjuez.html
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