IF YOU'RE in the Comunidad Valenciana any time between now and the early hours of March 20, you may notice an awful lot of noise and colour on the streets. It's the season for the region's biggest festival,...
Spain supersized: Showcasing the country's most colossal buildings
02/05/2022
IMAGINE you're at a pub quiz and the question came up, “Which is the largest building in Spain?”
Chances are, if you're reading this, you either live in Spain, spend a lot of time here on visits or holidays, or you have a strong interest in this fascinating chunk of land in Europe's far south-west – the peninsula, its island regions that spread out from halfway to Italy in one direction and to southern Morocco in another, and its cities along the north African coast. So, it's likely your pen is poised as your brain instinctively reassures you, “Oh, that's easy! It's...”
And now you're stuck.
We might be able to help you out, but you'd need to probe the quizmaster or quizmistress for more information first.
Does the question refer to the tallest?
The largest single structure?
The one with the most floors?
The biggest commercial building?
The building with the greatest area size, or floor space, irrespective of how many storeys it has?
The building whose structure covers the most ground?
What we can tell you about the latter is that the one you're looking at in the first picture above (by Civitatis), and which isn't an airport terminal, could gobble up Westminster Palace – those iconic Houses of Parliament along the banks of the Thames in London – nearly two-and-a-half times over, Buckingham Palace almost four times, and Wembley Stadium seven times...and that it's not where you think it is.
Tallest buildings
Skyscrapers are a recent phenomenon in Spain. Only 18 of the tallest today were standing as at the end of last century, and the four highest, company head offices in Madrid, are barely 15 years old and clustered together in the district known as – guess what? - Las Cuatro Torres.
The first of these to go up, the Emperador Tower, was completed in 2007 and stands 230 metres (754 feet) and 56 floors high; the lift breaking down if your office is near the roof is almost certainly a valid excuse for not going into work that day.
Three more appeared in 2008, being the Torre PwC (PwC Tower), at 236 metres (774 feet) and 52 floors, then the headquarters of the national petroleum company CEPSA, at 248 metres and 33 centimetres, or 815 feet, but with a 'mere' 45 floors, and finally, the tallest building in the whole of Spain, the Torre de Cristal, or 'Glass Tower', at 249 metres (817 feet), with 52 floors.
Even if, by preference, you'd rather be in a rural cove, a secluded bay, an unspoilt and rugged stretch of remote coast, or perhaps a cosy little residential hub on the sea, there's still something magical and stimulating about a high-rise urban beach skyline; perhaps their penthouse suites being up in the clouds elevates the mind, like high ceilings (although you try to put off redecorating both for as long as you can get away with).
And Spain's skyscraper beach par excellence is, of course, Benidorm – the town that's home to the tallest of the country's buildings outside the capital.
An upright square horseshoe, the Residencial Intempo stands 192 metres (630 feet), meaning it hits your view several kilometres down the motorway from the Costa Blanca holiday hotspot, even before its trademark Benidorm Island, that windswept bit of rock off the shore which is instantly recognisable.
But with 'only' 47 storeys, the Gran Hotel Bali beats it comfortably: Six metres (20 feet) shorter (186 and 610 respectively), this holiday resort finished in 2002 was, for its first five years of its life, Spain's tallest building, with 52 floors.
The Residencial Intempo was only finished last year, but the Bali is now 20 years old, meaning it enjoyed quite a long reign as Spain's highest building by a long way; of all the country's edifices of 100 metres (328 feet) or more in height, it was one of the five earliest of the 21st century.
Nearby Villajoyosa's Atrium Beach Mar hotel (102 metres with 28 storeys), Benidorm's own Hotel Playa Azul (105 metres with 34 floors), and Valencia's Torre de Francia (115 metres and 35 storeys) went up the same year as the Bali; for the whole of the previous year, Benidorm's biggest building by height was the Neguri Gane, with 40 floors over 145 metres (476 feet), concluded in 2001.
Until 70 years ago, Spain was generally fairly low-rise, compared with how it is now and especially compared with other countries and their largest cities around the world; when the iconic and instantly-familiar Plaza de España building went up in Madrid, in 1952, its 117 metres (384 feet) over 25 floors was unprecedented on Spanish soil.
Although unlikely to knock Madrid and Benidorm off their pedestals, Málaga and Bilbao clearly want in on the '100-plus metres' list, with skyscrapers due for completion next year being the AQ Urban Sky I and II in the former (113 and 108 metres, or 370 and 354 feet, respectively, each with 30 storeys), and the 119-metre (390-foot) Anboto Dorrea in the latter.
And although Spain still does not have a 'mile-high club', planning applications going through could give the country at least one building that breaks the quarter-kilometre barrier: A whopping 300 metres (985 feet) in height, the tallest of the three Torre Madrid Nuevo Norte complexes will have a vertigo-inducing 77 storeys.
Basically, even on a clear day, you'd have to lie on the ground on your back to be able to see the top.
Tallest structures
An architectural feature not classed as a 'building' might be a chimney, a mast, a telecomms transmitter, or similar – and in the case of these, Spain already has broken the quarter-kilometre mark several times.
In fact, the tallest of these in the whole of the European Union is found in the same province as Benidorm's hypoxia-causing top-floor towers.
Guardamar del Segura, southern Alicante province, has boasted the highest construction in continental Europe for 60 years, but you could easily drive past without noticing it.
The guyed mast, or radio transmitter, just inland from Urbanisation Benamor and Urbanisation Pòrtic Platja was erected by the Spanish Royal Navy in 1962 and stands a dizzying 380 metres (1,246 feet and nine inches) tall, but its mostly white-and-pale-grey colours means it blends into the sky except on a bright blue day.
After the piece known as the Torreta de Guardamar, the next three tallest non-building structures in Spain are power station chimneys, two in the far north-western region of Galicia (Endesa Termic in As Pontes at 356 metres or 1,168 feet, and the Compostilla II chimney in Cubillos del Sil at 290 metres, or 951 feet) and one in southern Aragón, a chimney at Teruel power plant of 343 metres, or 1,125 feet in height.
Largest structure by 'useable' floor space over multiple storeys
Spain's biggest buildings, in terms of area space rather than height, are not necessarily the buildings that take up the most actual floor. If you think about it, a two-storey home occupying 100 square metres of ground, with each floor being 100 square metres, is, in fact, a 200-square-metre building.
A seven-storey apartment block with two apartments per floor of 150 square metres does not immediately look huge – except in the context of its surroundings, if, for example, it's in the middle of a small village, out in the countryside or on an otherwise low-rise coastline – but is in fact 2,100 square metres in size, not including communal areas.
In other words, the buildings listed as, statistically, the biggest in Spain by area are not necessarily the most vast to the naked eye.
Dwarfed by mega-structures in Asia, especially China and the Middle East, Barcelona's El Prat airport Terminal 1 is the most spacious in the country at 544,000 square metres, or 5.86 million square feet – in an international list topped by Chengdu's New Century Global Centre, in China (1.76 million square metres, or 18.9 million square feet), followed by Dubai airport Terminal 3 (1.71 million square metres or 18.4 million square feet), and the 1,906-foot-tall, 1.58-million-square-metre (16.96-million-square-foot) Endowment building, the Abraj Al-Bait, in the Holy City of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
İstanbul airport's main terminal is Europe's largest building by floor space irrespective of number of storeys – serving Turkey's and Europe's biggest city, this massive transport hub measures 1.44 million square metres, or 15.5 million square feet – and the most spacious building in the European Union is Frankfurt airport Terminal 1, in Germany, at 1.3 million square metres, or 14 million square feet.
In fact, Barcelona airport T1 is only the 37th-largest building in floor area in the world, but it's the sixth-largest in Europe – the fifth-largest being İstanbul's Perpa Trade Centre, at 660,000 square metres – and the fourth-largest in the European Union, beaten by Amsterdam's Schipol airport (650,000 square metres, or seven million square feet) and, in the same country, the Flower Auction building in Aalsmeer (990,000 square metres, or 10.7 million square feet).
If ever you've flown out of Madrid's Adolfo Suárez-Barajas airport, you'll know that it's a good 10-minute drive by motorway between terminals, and that you need to jump on a shuttle to get from one end of Terminal 4 to the other – in fact, it's Spain's second-largest building by total space, at 470,000 square metres (4.94 million square feet), the sixth-largest in the European Union after Frankfurt airport Terminal 2 (476,000 square metres, or 5.12 million square feet), and the 47th-largest on earth.
Effectively, Spain is one of only four European countries – with Turkey, Germany and The Netherlands – and three European Union member States which enter the world's top 60 most spacious buildings by area.
Largest low-rise structure by floor space
Back to those London buildings we mentioned. When the Queen is in residence at Buckingham Palace, she, in theory, has a whole 77,000 square metres to work, rest, entertain and play in.
That's approximately the equivalent of 1,000 small-ish two-bedroomed flats in Spain, although of course, HRH Elizabeth II will not be using all of it. The palace includes offices, residential wings, staff quarters, and everything else you'd expect a working 'Royal village' to need.
Wembley Stadium is dwarfed by 'Buck House', as it's affectionately known by the UK public, at 40,000 square metres; a small one-bedroomed British flat in a town would typically fit into this huge concert and sporting venue 1,000 times over.
Even if you've never been to London or, indeed, the UK, you're likely to have watched international news on TV and seen the panoramic, ornate sandstone-coloured structure that is the Palace of Westminster, with the famous Big Ben clock tower on one side, home to the two Houses of Parliament – the House of Commons and House of Lords – which dominates the horizon as a backdrop to the Thames river.
Originally built 1,006 years ago, but demolished in 1834 and reconstructed over 36 years from 1840, the Palace of Westminster is almost the size of 'Buck House' and Wembley Stadium put together – at 112,476 square metres (1,210,680 square feet).
But if Spain's largest non-commercial building was a residential home, the Palace of Westminster would just about fit into the kitchen.
You've probably assumed Spain's most spacious non-commercial building is something Royal, or at least, aristocratic.
In fact, Madrid's Royal Palace – one of the capital's most fascinating and beautiful visitor attractions (inside and out; it's one of the few official, currently-used Head of State residences that's open to the public) – nearly doubles Buckingham Palace in floor space and exceeds the Palace of Westminster by nearly a fifth, at 135,000 square metres, with 3,418 rooms.
If one human standing up occupies a square metre, then, you could get the entire population of a small city, such as Norwich, UK, squashed up together inside.
The King and Queen of Spain, though, live in a much more 'modest' structure – the Zarzuela Palace, also in Madrid, is 3,150 square metres, and HRHs Felipe VI and Letizia, along with daughter Sofía (who turned 15 on Friday – feliz cumpleaños, Infanta) and Leonor, 16, when she's home from her college holidays in Wales, share it with Felipe VI's parents.
'Queen Mother' Sofía lives in a different wing, and the abdicated King Juan Carlos I in another, although he's currently staying in the United Arab Emirates. So, for all three generations to get together for Sunday paella, they'd have to phone or FaceTime each other, rather like neighbours on the same street.
President Pedro Sánchez has a good deal more room where he lives. The official residence of Spain's government leader is the Moncloa Palace – the national answer to the White House or 10 Downing Street – and the complex as a whole, complete with its gardens, totals 58,294 square metres, backing on all sides onto Madrid's 'University City', or 'student village'.
Again, though, it's not all Sánchez's work, rest and play space. The Moncloa is the government's everyday, working headquarters, housing offices and weekday residences of several ministers.
Mediaeval Arab dynasties went much more into supersizing, however. Granada's Alhambra Palace, one of Europe's top visitor sites and famous all over the planet, occupies a humongous 262,309 square metres, although this is not just one building. The monumental seat of the Nasrid Emir Muhammad I Ibn al-Ahmar, founder of the Emirate of Granada, is a fortified complex containing various palaces and what was originally an entire city.
But the building which occupies the most land for its structure alone is neither Royal, nor is it in Madrid, or even in a particularly large city at all.
It does have the word 'city' in its name, though.
City of Culture, Gijón, Asturias
That green and pleasant land which brought us the legendary Formula 1 racing driver Fernando Alonso, and which gives the heir to the Spanish throne their title – Leonor is currently Princess of it, and her dad was Prince of it before he became King in summer 2014 – is not exactly famous for its booming metropolitan sprawls, cloud-slicing tower blocks and neon billboards.
The Principality of Asturias, on the northern coast of the mainland and right next door to the nation's westernmost region of Galicia, is more associated with dairy farming, rural tourism, rolling emerald hills, snowy mountains, and raw, rocky coastlines.
It's very northern European in appearance, and its green cliffs above virgin beaches, fishing villages and rockpools accord more with a typical image of Scotland rather than Spain – palm trees, whitewashed villas and cacti growing wild are as alien to Asturias as they are to Austria.
The largest city in Asturias is Gijón, also on its coast, home to a modest 272,365 residents, the vast majority of whom are Spanish – it's a far cry from the cosmopolitan eastern and southern shores, where literally hundreds of nationalities blend in with each other – the second-largest, birthplace of Fernando Alonso himself, is Oviedo, with 220,301, and the third, Avilés, is a long way off it in headcount, with fewer than 80,000.
Then there are another 75 municipalities, or Concejos, of which only six have more than 20,000 inhabitants (Siero, Langreo and Mieres complete this list), around a fifth have fewer than 1,100, and two of them – Pesoz and Yernes y Tameza – have fewer than 200 (156 and 140, respectively).
So it's not where you'd expect to find a building that takes up twice the space of Madrid's Royal Palace, nearly one-and-a-third times Paris' Musée du Louvre, more than half the Tesla factory in California, two-and-a-half times the Boeing Composite Wing Centre in Everett, Washington, or almost three times London's O2 Arena.
Gijón's Ciudad de la Cultura ('City of Culture', or 'Arts and Entertainment Village') used to be the region's Universidad Laboral, a kind of high-end vocational college aimed at the children of unskilled and semi-skilled land-workers and manual labourers, so they could gain quality, recognisable qualifications in the trades they had grown up with.
Specialist metalworkers, industrial bosses, master decorators, surveyors, insurance loss adjusters, and all types of other professions at the most skilled, expert extreme of what was once called 'the trades' or 'blue collar' came out of the Universidad Laboral, with its vast series of sophisticated workshops for training.
It was originally designed to be an orphanage, following a devastating mining accident in the Caudal quarry in 1940 which left hundreds of kids with no parents, although by the time work started on building it in 1948, many of those orphans had grown up, married, and had no need for the facilities of a children's care home.
The complex took nine years to build, and by the time it was almost finished, the planners and city authorities changed their minds about what to do with it – after all, it was now 1957, so even those who had been orphaned as babies during the mining disaster were now adults of working age.
As a vocational university, its popularity started to decline around the 1980s, leading the regional government to reconsidering its purpose at the dawn of the new century.
And at a colossal 270,000 square metres, standing in 247 acres (one million square metres, or nearly 108 million square feet) of gardens and working farmland, finding a meaningful rôle for this titanic feat of architecture was clearly going to involve a lot of brainstorming.
TV studio, drama college, stadium, theatre...and the world's biggest church
Nobody could accuse Asturias of letting this mammoth, classical-style, self-contained complex go to waste. It's almost Westminster Palace-style in layout, and the buildings around its huge Plaza are used for just about everything related to the arts, media, education, heritage, entertainment or anything in connection with broadcasting, performance and the humanities, at a regional level, not just locally.
A six-year renovation, starting in 2001, resulted in a Ciudad de la Cultura with facilities for hosting concerts, shows, theatrical productions, art exhibitions and creative workshops, with much of its teaching, training and classroom infrastructure retained.
This enabled it to house the regional Professional Music and Dance Conservatory, the High School of Dramatic Arts, a complete professional and vocational training college, and numerous higher education faculties.
A giant library, a film studio – outdoor scenes in a variety of eras for full-length features or television serials can be shot in its wide-open squares which could easily pass as a stately-looking city centre for any production, as can indoor scenes against a background of the old convent – and it's now the headquarters of the regional radio and TV broadcasting company; Asturias' own BBC, if you will.
Much of the original structure was retained, including the world's largest church – 807 square metres, in an elliptical or crescent shape – and a theatre which takes its inspiration from the globally-famous Library in Turkey's Ancient Ephesus complex, which is a raised platform with impressive Roman columns that, according to tour guides, nearly always ends up being visitors' Facebook cover photo the very day after they see it.
More Ancient inspiration comes in the shape of the spire, which puts Madrid's Plaza de España building, Benidorm's Playa Azul Hotel, Valencia's Torre Francia and Villajoyosa's Atrium Beach Mar in the shade: Standing at a vertiginous 129 metres and 25 centimetres in height, the most eye-catching feature of the 'City of Culture' is modelled on the lighthouse in Alexandria, northern Egypt – one of the now-defunct original Seven Wonders of the World – with a dash of the Hercules Tower and Sevilla's Giralda Tower, part of the southern city's cathedral, which is the biggest in Spain and third-largest in Europe.
Naturally, you can visit the Ciudad de la Cultura, or most of it, if you're in Asturias. But allow yourself plenty of time to explore it.
After all, the Alhambra Palace in Granada takes a full day to tour around, and can stretch into two or more if you want to see it in detail; Gijón's City of Culture is another eight square metres larger.
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IMAGINE you're at a pub quiz and the question came up, “Which is the largest building in Spain?”
Chances are, if you're reading this, you either live in Spain, spend a lot of time here on visits or holidays, or you have a strong interest in this fascinating chunk of land in Europe's far south-west – the peninsula, its island regions that spread out from halfway to Italy in one direction and to southern Morocco in another, and its cities along the north African coast. So, it's likely your pen is poised as your brain instinctively reassures you, “Oh, that's easy! It's...”
And now you're stuck.
We might be able to help you out, but you'd need to probe the quizmaster or quizmistress for more information first.
Does the question refer to the tallest?
The largest single structure?
The one with the most floors?
The biggest commercial building?
The building with the greatest area size, or floor space, irrespective of how many storeys it has?
The building whose structure covers the most ground?
What we can tell you about the latter is that the one you're looking at in the first picture above (by Civitatis), and which isn't an airport terminal, could gobble up Westminster Palace – those iconic Houses of Parliament along the banks of the Thames in London – nearly two-and-a-half times over, Buckingham Palace almost four times, and Wembley Stadium seven times...and that it's not where you think it is.
Tallest buildings
Skyscrapers are a recent phenomenon in Spain. Only 18 of the tallest today were standing as at the end of last century, and the four highest, company head offices in Madrid, are barely 15 years old and clustered together in the district known as – guess what? - Las Cuatro Torres.
The first of these to go up, the Emperador Tower, was completed in 2007 and stands 230 metres (754 feet) and 56 floors high; the lift breaking down if your office is near the roof is almost certainly a valid excuse for not going into work that day.
Three more appeared in 2008, being the Torre PwC (PwC Tower), at 236 metres (774 feet) and 52 floors, then the headquarters of the national petroleum company CEPSA, at 248 metres and 33 centimetres, or 815 feet, but with a 'mere' 45 floors, and finally, the tallest building in the whole of Spain, the Torre de Cristal, or 'Glass Tower', at 249 metres (817 feet), with 52 floors.
Even if, by preference, you'd rather be in a rural cove, a secluded bay, an unspoilt and rugged stretch of remote coast, or perhaps a cosy little residential hub on the sea, there's still something magical and stimulating about a high-rise urban beach skyline; perhaps their penthouse suites being up in the clouds elevates the mind, like high ceilings (although you try to put off redecorating both for as long as you can get away with).
And Spain's skyscraper beach par excellence is, of course, Benidorm – the town that's home to the tallest of the country's buildings outside the capital.
An upright square horseshoe, the Residencial Intempo stands 192 metres (630 feet), meaning it hits your view several kilometres down the motorway from the Costa Blanca holiday hotspot, even before its trademark Benidorm Island, that windswept bit of rock off the shore which is instantly recognisable.
But with 'only' 47 storeys, the Gran Hotel Bali beats it comfortably: Six metres (20 feet) shorter (186 and 610 respectively), this holiday resort finished in 2002 was, for its first five years of its life, Spain's tallest building, with 52 floors.
The Residencial Intempo was only finished last year, but the Bali is now 20 years old, meaning it enjoyed quite a long reign as Spain's highest building by a long way; of all the country's edifices of 100 metres (328 feet) or more in height, it was one of the five earliest of the 21st century.
Nearby Villajoyosa's Atrium Beach Mar hotel (102 metres with 28 storeys), Benidorm's own Hotel Playa Azul (105 metres with 34 floors), and Valencia's Torre de Francia (115 metres and 35 storeys) went up the same year as the Bali; for the whole of the previous year, Benidorm's biggest building by height was the Neguri Gane, with 40 floors over 145 metres (476 feet), concluded in 2001.
Until 70 years ago, Spain was generally fairly low-rise, compared with how it is now and especially compared with other countries and their largest cities around the world; when the iconic and instantly-familiar Plaza de España building went up in Madrid, in 1952, its 117 metres (384 feet) over 25 floors was unprecedented on Spanish soil.
Although unlikely to knock Madrid and Benidorm off their pedestals, Málaga and Bilbao clearly want in on the '100-plus metres' list, with skyscrapers due for completion next year being the AQ Urban Sky I and II in the former (113 and 108 metres, or 370 and 354 feet, respectively, each with 30 storeys), and the 119-metre (390-foot) Anboto Dorrea in the latter.
And although Spain still does not have a 'mile-high club', planning applications going through could give the country at least one building that breaks the quarter-kilometre barrier: A whopping 300 metres (985 feet) in height, the tallest of the three Torre Madrid Nuevo Norte complexes will have a vertigo-inducing 77 storeys.
Basically, even on a clear day, you'd have to lie on the ground on your back to be able to see the top.
Tallest structures
An architectural feature not classed as a 'building' might be a chimney, a mast, a telecomms transmitter, or similar – and in the case of these, Spain already has broken the quarter-kilometre mark several times.
In fact, the tallest of these in the whole of the European Union is found in the same province as Benidorm's hypoxia-causing top-floor towers.
Guardamar del Segura, southern Alicante province, has boasted the highest construction in continental Europe for 60 years, but you could easily drive past without noticing it.
The guyed mast, or radio transmitter, just inland from Urbanisation Benamor and Urbanisation Pòrtic Platja was erected by the Spanish Royal Navy in 1962 and stands a dizzying 380 metres (1,246 feet and nine inches) tall, but its mostly white-and-pale-grey colours means it blends into the sky except on a bright blue day.
After the piece known as the Torreta de Guardamar, the next three tallest non-building structures in Spain are power station chimneys, two in the far north-western region of Galicia (Endesa Termic in As Pontes at 356 metres or 1,168 feet, and the Compostilla II chimney in Cubillos del Sil at 290 metres, or 951 feet) and one in southern Aragón, a chimney at Teruel power plant of 343 metres, or 1,125 feet in height.
Largest structure by 'useable' floor space over multiple storeys
Spain's biggest buildings, in terms of area space rather than height, are not necessarily the buildings that take up the most actual floor. If you think about it, a two-storey home occupying 100 square metres of ground, with each floor being 100 square metres, is, in fact, a 200-square-metre building.
A seven-storey apartment block with two apartments per floor of 150 square metres does not immediately look huge – except in the context of its surroundings, if, for example, it's in the middle of a small village, out in the countryside or on an otherwise low-rise coastline – but is in fact 2,100 square metres in size, not including communal areas.
In other words, the buildings listed as, statistically, the biggest in Spain by area are not necessarily the most vast to the naked eye.
Dwarfed by mega-structures in Asia, especially China and the Middle East, Barcelona's El Prat airport Terminal 1 is the most spacious in the country at 544,000 square metres, or 5.86 million square feet – in an international list topped by Chengdu's New Century Global Centre, in China (1.76 million square metres, or 18.9 million square feet), followed by Dubai airport Terminal 3 (1.71 million square metres or 18.4 million square feet), and the 1,906-foot-tall, 1.58-million-square-metre (16.96-million-square-foot) Endowment building, the Abraj Al-Bait, in the Holy City of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
İstanbul airport's main terminal is Europe's largest building by floor space irrespective of number of storeys – serving Turkey's and Europe's biggest city, this massive transport hub measures 1.44 million square metres, or 15.5 million square feet – and the most spacious building in the European Union is Frankfurt airport Terminal 1, in Germany, at 1.3 million square metres, or 14 million square feet.
In fact, Barcelona airport T1 is only the 37th-largest building in floor area in the world, but it's the sixth-largest in Europe – the fifth-largest being İstanbul's Perpa Trade Centre, at 660,000 square metres – and the fourth-largest in the European Union, beaten by Amsterdam's Schipol airport (650,000 square metres, or seven million square feet) and, in the same country, the Flower Auction building in Aalsmeer (990,000 square metres, or 10.7 million square feet).
If ever you've flown out of Madrid's Adolfo Suárez-Barajas airport, you'll know that it's a good 10-minute drive by motorway between terminals, and that you need to jump on a shuttle to get from one end of Terminal 4 to the other – in fact, it's Spain's second-largest building by total space, at 470,000 square metres (4.94 million square feet), the sixth-largest in the European Union after Frankfurt airport Terminal 2 (476,000 square metres, or 5.12 million square feet), and the 47th-largest on earth.
Effectively, Spain is one of only four European countries – with Turkey, Germany and The Netherlands – and three European Union member States which enter the world's top 60 most spacious buildings by area.
Largest low-rise structure by floor space
Back to those London buildings we mentioned. When the Queen is in residence at Buckingham Palace, she, in theory, has a whole 77,000 square metres to work, rest, entertain and play in.
That's approximately the equivalent of 1,000 small-ish two-bedroomed flats in Spain, although of course, HRH Elizabeth II will not be using all of it. The palace includes offices, residential wings, staff quarters, and everything else you'd expect a working 'Royal village' to need.
Wembley Stadium is dwarfed by 'Buck House', as it's affectionately known by the UK public, at 40,000 square metres; a small one-bedroomed British flat in a town would typically fit into this huge concert and sporting venue 1,000 times over.
Even if you've never been to London or, indeed, the UK, you're likely to have watched international news on TV and seen the panoramic, ornate sandstone-coloured structure that is the Palace of Westminster, with the famous Big Ben clock tower on one side, home to the two Houses of Parliament – the House of Commons and House of Lords – which dominates the horizon as a backdrop to the Thames river.
Originally built 1,006 years ago, but demolished in 1834 and reconstructed over 36 years from 1840, the Palace of Westminster is almost the size of 'Buck House' and Wembley Stadium put together – at 112,476 square metres (1,210,680 square feet).
But if Spain's largest non-commercial building was a residential home, the Palace of Westminster would just about fit into the kitchen.
You've probably assumed Spain's most spacious non-commercial building is something Royal, or at least, aristocratic.
In fact, Madrid's Royal Palace – one of the capital's most fascinating and beautiful visitor attractions (inside and out; it's one of the few official, currently-used Head of State residences that's open to the public) – nearly doubles Buckingham Palace in floor space and exceeds the Palace of Westminster by nearly a fifth, at 135,000 square metres, with 3,418 rooms.
If one human standing up occupies a square metre, then, you could get the entire population of a small city, such as Norwich, UK, squashed up together inside.
The King and Queen of Spain, though, live in a much more 'modest' structure – the Zarzuela Palace, also in Madrid, is 3,150 square metres, and HRHs Felipe VI and Letizia, along with daughter Sofía (who turned 15 on Friday – feliz cumpleaños, Infanta) and Leonor, 16, when she's home from her college holidays in Wales, share it with Felipe VI's parents.
'Queen Mother' Sofía lives in a different wing, and the abdicated King Juan Carlos I in another, although he's currently staying in the United Arab Emirates. So, for all three generations to get together for Sunday paella, they'd have to phone or FaceTime each other, rather like neighbours on the same street.
President Pedro Sánchez has a good deal more room where he lives. The official residence of Spain's government leader is the Moncloa Palace – the national answer to the White House or 10 Downing Street – and the complex as a whole, complete with its gardens, totals 58,294 square metres, backing on all sides onto Madrid's 'University City', or 'student village'.
Again, though, it's not all Sánchez's work, rest and play space. The Moncloa is the government's everyday, working headquarters, housing offices and weekday residences of several ministers.
Mediaeval Arab dynasties went much more into supersizing, however. Granada's Alhambra Palace, one of Europe's top visitor sites and famous all over the planet, occupies a humongous 262,309 square metres, although this is not just one building. The monumental seat of the Nasrid Emir Muhammad I Ibn al-Ahmar, founder of the Emirate of Granada, is a fortified complex containing various palaces and what was originally an entire city.
But the building which occupies the most land for its structure alone is neither Royal, nor is it in Madrid, or even in a particularly large city at all.
It does have the word 'city' in its name, though.
City of Culture, Gijón, Asturias
That green and pleasant land which brought us the legendary Formula 1 racing driver Fernando Alonso, and which gives the heir to the Spanish throne their title – Leonor is currently Princess of it, and her dad was Prince of it before he became King in summer 2014 – is not exactly famous for its booming metropolitan sprawls, cloud-slicing tower blocks and neon billboards.
The Principality of Asturias, on the northern coast of the mainland and right next door to the nation's westernmost region of Galicia, is more associated with dairy farming, rural tourism, rolling emerald hills, snowy mountains, and raw, rocky coastlines.
It's very northern European in appearance, and its green cliffs above virgin beaches, fishing villages and rockpools accord more with a typical image of Scotland rather than Spain – palm trees, whitewashed villas and cacti growing wild are as alien to Asturias as they are to Austria.
The largest city in Asturias is Gijón, also on its coast, home to a modest 272,365 residents, the vast majority of whom are Spanish – it's a far cry from the cosmopolitan eastern and southern shores, where literally hundreds of nationalities blend in with each other – the second-largest, birthplace of Fernando Alonso himself, is Oviedo, with 220,301, and the third, Avilés, is a long way off it in headcount, with fewer than 80,000.
Then there are another 75 municipalities, or Concejos, of which only six have more than 20,000 inhabitants (Siero, Langreo and Mieres complete this list), around a fifth have fewer than 1,100, and two of them – Pesoz and Yernes y Tameza – have fewer than 200 (156 and 140, respectively).
So it's not where you'd expect to find a building that takes up twice the space of Madrid's Royal Palace, nearly one-and-a-third times Paris' Musée du Louvre, more than half the Tesla factory in California, two-and-a-half times the Boeing Composite Wing Centre in Everett, Washington, or almost three times London's O2 Arena.
Gijón's Ciudad de la Cultura ('City of Culture', or 'Arts and Entertainment Village') used to be the region's Universidad Laboral, a kind of high-end vocational college aimed at the children of unskilled and semi-skilled land-workers and manual labourers, so they could gain quality, recognisable qualifications in the trades they had grown up with.
Specialist metalworkers, industrial bosses, master decorators, surveyors, insurance loss adjusters, and all types of other professions at the most skilled, expert extreme of what was once called 'the trades' or 'blue collar' came out of the Universidad Laboral, with its vast series of sophisticated workshops for training.
It was originally designed to be an orphanage, following a devastating mining accident in the Caudal quarry in 1940 which left hundreds of kids with no parents, although by the time work started on building it in 1948, many of those orphans had grown up, married, and had no need for the facilities of a children's care home.
The complex took nine years to build, and by the time it was almost finished, the planners and city authorities changed their minds about what to do with it – after all, it was now 1957, so even those who had been orphaned as babies during the mining disaster were now adults of working age.
As a vocational university, its popularity started to decline around the 1980s, leading the regional government to reconsidering its purpose at the dawn of the new century.
And at a colossal 270,000 square metres, standing in 247 acres (one million square metres, or nearly 108 million square feet) of gardens and working farmland, finding a meaningful rôle for this titanic feat of architecture was clearly going to involve a lot of brainstorming.
TV studio, drama college, stadium, theatre...and the world's biggest church
Nobody could accuse Asturias of letting this mammoth, classical-style, self-contained complex go to waste. It's almost Westminster Palace-style in layout, and the buildings around its huge Plaza are used for just about everything related to the arts, media, education, heritage, entertainment or anything in connection with broadcasting, performance and the humanities, at a regional level, not just locally.
A six-year renovation, starting in 2001, resulted in a Ciudad de la Cultura with facilities for hosting concerts, shows, theatrical productions, art exhibitions and creative workshops, with much of its teaching, training and classroom infrastructure retained.
This enabled it to house the regional Professional Music and Dance Conservatory, the High School of Dramatic Arts, a complete professional and vocational training college, and numerous higher education faculties.
A giant library, a film studio – outdoor scenes in a variety of eras for full-length features or television serials can be shot in its wide-open squares which could easily pass as a stately-looking city centre for any production, as can indoor scenes against a background of the old convent – and it's now the headquarters of the regional radio and TV broadcasting company; Asturias' own BBC, if you will.
Much of the original structure was retained, including the world's largest church – 807 square metres, in an elliptical or crescent shape – and a theatre which takes its inspiration from the globally-famous Library in Turkey's Ancient Ephesus complex, which is a raised platform with impressive Roman columns that, according to tour guides, nearly always ends up being visitors' Facebook cover photo the very day after they see it.
More Ancient inspiration comes in the shape of the spire, which puts Madrid's Plaza de España building, Benidorm's Playa Azul Hotel, Valencia's Torre Francia and Villajoyosa's Atrium Beach Mar in the shade: Standing at a vertiginous 129 metres and 25 centimetres in height, the most eye-catching feature of the 'City of Culture' is modelled on the lighthouse in Alexandria, northern Egypt – one of the now-defunct original Seven Wonders of the World – with a dash of the Hercules Tower and Sevilla's Giralda Tower, part of the southern city's cathedral, which is the biggest in Spain and third-largest in Europe.
Naturally, you can visit the Ciudad de la Cultura, or most of it, if you're in Asturias. But allow yourself plenty of time to explore it.
After all, the Alhambra Palace in Granada takes a full day to tour around, and can stretch into two or more if you want to see it in detail; Gijón's City of Culture is another eight square metres larger.
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