List of monasteries in Madrid
The following compilation of convents and monasteries in the city of Madrid includes monasteries past and present in Madrid, Spain, divided by the reign in which they were founded. The list gives a sense of how large the monastic communities grew to be in the capital city. Monastic institutions were abundant in Madrid and in Spain before the 19th century. An accurate history would trace the change in tenor and geography of the institutions over the ages, with novel infusions occurring over time, but these institutions commonly had a longevity measured in centuries, and therefore  accumulated over the centuries to a great density. They came to control a substantial portion of land and property, and this, in part, led to the rapacious expropriations and dismantling in the 19th century, starting with the secularist Napoleonic administration but continuing through the liberal governments of the 1830s, and given strong impetus during the Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizábal in 1835. Further spasms of destruction in Madrid occurred during the Spanish Civil War. Many of the boulevards and plazas of the present Madrid derive from the destruction of dozens of monasteries. For some, the only remnant is their church. Others  have been put to secular uses. Others have vanished altogether, and only remain as a historic trace embedded in place-name. The exact number of monasteries and convents in Madrid prior to the "Desamortizacion" is unclear. Among contemporary sources, they list: While this number seems elevated, it was not the most densely monastic urban center in Spain. There are sources that claim Spain had over 9000 monasteries prior to the 19th century. The distribution was not even across the peninsula. Some small towns for historical circumstances had accumulated many institutions; for example, Ávila with 1000 households, had 9 monasteries and  7 nunneries. The entire province of Galicia, with a population of 1.3 million had a total of 98 monastic houses with a population of 2400 monks and 600 nuns. The province of Leon, with half the population had twice the number of monasteries. In the early 19th century, the ancient, and theologically important, city of Toledo had 90 monasteries and 68 nunneries in a city of 25 thousand persons.