Palacio de Cibeles

Palacio de Cibeles stands on Madrid's Plaza de Cibeles, designed by the architects Antonio Palacios and Joaquin Otamendi after they won a municipal competition to build a new headquarters for the Society of Post and Telegraph, with construction running twelve years from 1907 until the building's official opening on March 14, 1919. It originally functioned as the city's central postal facility, a modern distribution center for mail, telegraph and telephone service, reflecting the scale of Spain's early twentieth century communications infrastructure. The building's Eclectic and Neo-Plateresque design combines white stone facades with baroque decorative elements, a style contemporary with Madrid's broader early modernist architectural period. Since 2007 the palace has housed the City Council of Madrid alongside a public cultural center, its municipal offices having relocated there from elsewhere in the city. The building takes its popular name from the Cibeles Fountain in the plaza before it, itself dedicated to the ancient goddess Cybele, though the palace is a distinct twentieth century civic structure rather than any religious monument to her.