page_title: History of Madrid
section_title: Civil War (1936–1939)
hierarchical_section_title: History of Madrid / Civil War (1936–1939)
caption_attribution_description: English: Nationalist soldiers raiding a suburb of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War
context_page_description: The documented history of Madrid dates to the 9th century, even though the area has been inhabited since the Stone Age. The development of Madrid as administrative centre began when Philip II set his court there in the 1560s. Madrid has been the country's capital continuously since 1606.
context_section_description: Botched coup
  The military uprising of July 1936 was defeated in Madrid by a combination of loyal forces and workers' militias. On 20 July armed workers and loyal troops stormed the single focus of resistance, the Cuartel de La Montaña, defended by a contingent of 2,000 rebel soldiers accompanied by 500 falangists under the command of General Fanjul, killing over one hundred of rebels after their surrender. Aside from the Cuartel de la Montaña episode, the wider scheme for the coup in the capital largely failed both due to disastrous rebel planning and due to the Government delivering weapons to the people wanting to defend the Republic, with the city becoming a symbol of popular resistance, "the people in arms".
  Siege
  After the quelling of the coup d'état, from 1936–1939, Madrid was held by forces loyal to the Spanish Republic. Following the seemingly unstopable advance towards Madrid of rebel land troops, the first air bombings on Madrid also started. Immediately after the bombing of the nearing airports of Getafe and Cuatro Vientos, Madrid proper was bombed for the first time in the night of the 27–28 August 1936 by a Luftwaffe's Junkers Ju 52 that threw several bombs on the Ministry of War and the Station of the North. Madrid "was to become the first big european city to be bombed by aviation".
  Rebel General Francisco Franco, recently given the supreme military command over his faction, took a detour in late September to "liberate" the besieged Alcázar de Toledo. Meanwhile, this operation gave time to the republicans in Madrid to build defenses and start receiving some foreign support.
  The Summer and Autumn of 1936 saw the Republican Madrid witness of heavy-hand repression by Communist and Socialist groups, symbolised by the murder of prisoners in checas and sacas directed mostly against military personnel and leading politicians linked to the rebels, which, culminated by the horrific Paracuellos massacres in the context of a simultaneous major rebel offensive against the city, were halted by early December.
  Madrid, besieged from October 1936, saw a major offensive in its western suburbs in November of that year.
  Collapse
  In the last weeks of the war the collapse of the republic was speeded by Colonel Segismundo Casado, who, endorsed by some political figures such as Anarchist Cipriano Mera and Julián Besteiro, a PSOE leader who had held talks with the Falangist fifth column in the city, threw a military coup against the legitimate government under the pretext of excessive communist preponderance, propelling a mini-civil war in Madrid that, won by the casadistas, left roughly 2,000 casualties between 5–10 March 1939.
  The city fell to the nationalists on 28 March 1939.
caption: Francoist troops storming a suburb of the city in 1937
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