Pozuelo de Alarcón
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Pozuelo de Alarcón is a suburb of over 75,000 inhabitants near the city of Madrid, capital of Spain. It is surrounded by large Mediterranean pine-tree forests: la Casa de Campo, el Monte del Pardo and el Monte del Pilar. It is situated ten kilometres northwest of Moncloa District in Madrid.
Temperatures are cooler than Madrid's all year round due to its proximity to Madrid's Sierra de Guadarrama Mountains, about 60 kilometres northwest of Pozuelo.
Pozuelo has become a low-density residential area during the last decades as new residential urbanizations have quickly spread over formerly agricultural lands. Also, new transport infrastuctures (the M-40, Madrid's bypass) cross the municipality's area. Additionally, work on a tram-link line (an open-air tube line) is ongoing. By 2007 it is expected that this tram line will connect Aluche district, in the city of Madrid, with Pozuelo.
The standard of living in most of its neighbourhoods is high, although some old city-centre areas, where a growing economic immigrant population has moved in to live, are excluded from such wealth. However, this may change in a few years' time because of fast-growing housing prices that spur property owners to sell their old houses.
Pozuelo is also dotted with long urban parks that separate the different urban areas. The most attractive area from an urban planning point of view is the Avenida de Europa, an urban development designed around a wide boulevard.
The Municipal Council has been ruled by political conservatives since the first democratic elections of the modern Spanish democracy took place. A new mayor was elected in the 2003 elections after the former mayor, who had been ruling for more than twenty years, was forced to remove his candidature.
The local festivities, the "Fiestas Patronales", take place in July and in the beginning of September.
Pozuelo is twinned with the municipalities of Issy-les-Moulineaux in France and Poznań in Poland.
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