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The Aranjuez cultural landscape is an entity of complex relationships: between nature and human activity, between sinuous watercourses and geometric landscape design, between the rural and the urban, between forest landscape and the delicately modulated architecture of its palatial buildings. Three hundred years of royal attention to the development and care of this landscape have seen it express an evolution of concepts from humanism and political centralization, to characteristics such as those found in its 18th century French-style Baroque garden, to the urban lifestyle which developed alongside the sciences of plant acclimatization and stock-breeding during the Age of Enlightenment.
The Royal Palace of Aranjuez (Spanish: Palacio Real de Aranjuez) is a residence of the King of Spain, located in the town of Aranjuez, Community of Madrid, Spain. The palace is open to the public as one of the Spanish royal sites.
It was commissioned by Philip II and designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, who also designed El Escorial. It was completed during the reign of Ferdinand VI by the mid-18th century; Charles III had two wings added to it.The huge gardens, built to relieve its royal residents from the dust and drought of the Spanish meseta using the waters of the adjacent Tagus and Jarama rivers, are Spain's most important of the Habsburg period. The Jardín de la Isla is on a man-made island bounded by the River Tagus and the Ria Canal. The Jardín del Principe contains a miniature palace (the Casa del Labrador, built forCharles IV) and the Museo de las Falúas Reales, housing the most important extant collection of Spain's royal pleasure barges.The Concierto de Aranjuez is a composition for classical guitar and orchestra written by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo, who was inspired by the palace gardens. The work attempts to take the listener through sounds of nature in and around the gardens during the period in which it was written.The palace's important art and historical collections include the Museo de la Vida en Palacio, describing the daily lives of Spain's monarchs.