River to motorway to river again Madrid Río is another case where long neglected riverfront is being returned to the city. The Manzanares River was always there, but for decades the M-30 motorway dominated its banks. Instead of being a central landscape, the river became the backside of road infrastructure: noisy, hard to reach and cut off from the neighbourhoods around it. Between 2003 and 2007, Madrid buried much of the M-30 along the river in tunnels. The traffic did not disappear, but the surface changed completely. What had been motorway space became Madrid Río: a long linear park with t…