Calle de Arturo Soria y Calle de las Cañas

Where the old buildings of Calle Arturo Soria meet the modern high-rises of Calle Las Cañas.

Designed in 1894 by engineer Arturo Soria, Ciudad Lineal is, according to the COAM Architecture Foundation, one of the most interesting experiments in Spanish urbanism, due to its originality and importance, and has inspired other modern alternatives such as Pampus Linear City in Amsterdam.

Ciudad Lineal was Soria’s most famous work. He designed and developed the area through Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización, imagining the city of the future: urbanised rather than built, a healthy place full of trees and low houses with gardens.

“Soria’s ideas stemmed from his study of the problems of transport and communication, fundamental elements in the creation of his new city; and in his project for a railway-tram ring road we find the embryo of what would later become Ciudad Lineal, as Soria proposed the creation of neighbourhoods of low-cost houses on both sides of this railway line” (COAM).

Arturo Soria imagined cities in the form of a line, structures organised around the most modern means of transport of his time: the tram. The urban planner coined the term “rurban housing” to refer to single-family houses with gardens, half rural and half urban, but linked by public transport.

Today, most of the original buildings in Ciudad Lineal have disappeared, replaced by high-rise buildings that undermine the original intention of giving every family a house and every house a vegetable patch and a garden, Arturo Soria’s motto. Only a few examples remain, such as the house at no. 5 Calle Vizconde de los Asilos.

The tram tracks have been replaced by a boulevard on Calle Arturo Soria, the main artery of the Ciudad Lineal district. It runs for almost six kilometres from south to north through the north-east of Madrid, linking the districts of San Blas-Canillejas and Hortaleza.

Updated: 20/10/2025