🌆 Madrid

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A fuller introduction to Madrid is briefly reloading — the key facts below always show.

Quick facts

Madrid is in Spain, a country in Europe. For the living forecast here, open World Weather; Madrid’s population and history are described by the sourced introduction above (from Wikipedia).

Where Madrid sits on the Earth

At 40.42° north of the equator, Madrid is about 4,494 km from the equator itself and 5,513 km from its nearest pole — and that puts it in the temperate zone, where the four seasons and a long summer day versus a short winter day are the defining rhythm. Latitude is only the sky’s address, of course: altitude, oceans and winds write the actual weather, which is why two cities on the same parallel can need overcoats in one place and sun hats in the other. The numbers on this page come straight from the town’s own coordinates.

Two consequences of that latitude anyone can test. On the equinox the midday sun stands 49.6° above the horizon here (straight up at the equator, lower the further you go). And because the Earth is a sphere turning once a day, a point at this latitude is carried around its axis at roughly 1,274 km/h — fastest at the equator, nothing at the poles. As for daylight: Madrid sees its longest day lasts about 14.9 hours of daylight and its shortest about 9.1.

Nearest cities on our list: Valencia (302.1 km to the east-southeast), Bilbao (322.2 km to the north), Granada (360.4 km to the south), Seville (390.4 km to the south-southwest). Every profile here carries the same arithmetic, so the distances between any two of them can be checked by opening both pages.

The other side of the world: a straight line through the centre of the Earth from Madrid emerges at 40.42°S, 176.30°E — its antipode. The closest city on our list to that point is Wellington, about 160.3 km away; whether the antipode itself is ocean or land is a good quiz question before you look it up.

More cities in Spain

Barcelona · Seville · Valencia · Bilbao · Granada · Malaga.

Coordinates are an approximate city centre. Introduction & image: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), cached 30 days; the page renders even if the feed is momentarily unreachable.