Tres Cantos is a municipality of Spain located in Community of Madrid.
Originally belonging to Colmenar Viejo, it seceded from the latter municipality in 1991, becoming the youngest municipality in the region. The urbanised area was conceived as a "satellite city" of Madrid developed by urban planners in the 1970s. It has a population of 48 326 inhabitants in 2020.
The city, as other planned cities, has a distinctive structure. It consists of three phases and a newer development "Nuevo Tres Cantos". The two first phases are subdivided in sectors. Most sectors, especially in the first phase (North), include internally pedestrian public spaces, being surrounded by streets. The names of urban places are usually related to the sector in which they are located–for example, the Sector Océanos consists of five streets named after the five oceans.
The town hosts a number of Spanish headquarters of companies such as Siemens, Danone, Beiersdorf, advanced research at Merck, GSK, and a chapter of the Spanish High Committee of Scientific Research CSIC.
History
In 1969 to 1973, Vicente Mortes, the Minister of Housing (Ministro de la Vivienda), commissioned by the dictator Francisco Franco, was the first to establish and develop the town over a rural area. This was not the Tres Cantos we know today, because it was the old version of it. Later on, they decided to regenerate the city, copying what some English cities did during those times. In 1976, the company “Tres Cantos S.A.” was created and which regenerated the city. It is one of the company's projects planned on paper. Residential occupation began from 1982.
A separatist party promoted the independence of Tres Cantos, obtaining support from the PSOE municipal councillors (with the opposition of the People's Party; PP), and thus, Tres Cantos seceded from Colmenar Viejo in 1991, becoming a standalone municipality. Despite the opposition to independence from the PP ranks, the municipality has eventually become a PP stronghold. Infrastructure development has continued apace, with a current (2005) 5-year development plan by local government authorities allowing for expansion of up to 60,000 inhabitants. The first mayor of Tres Cantos was Antonio Osuna with an 80% level of support from the population.
Geography and location
Tres Cantos was built on former rural lands, about halfway from the northern outskirts of suburban Madrid to the Guadarrama mountain range, which are frequently snow-capped in winter. It lies in a slight valley formed with two eastwards-flowing creeks, bounded to the south by a higher plateau leading to Madrid, and to the west and north by more hilly terrain, which separates the area from the watershed of the Manzanares River. General elevation of the township is around 680 m, with a highest elevation within the municipality's borders of 730 m. The terrain rises towards the foothills of the Guadarrama range to the north and northwest, reaching elevations in excess of 800 m across the border in Colmenar Viejo. Within the urban area the terrain is gently undulating. It also an enormous new phase where there has been construction of new houses for new people for a long time. This new part of Tres Cantos is going to be named the Third Phase and is only composed of modern buildings and new houses for the city to expand.
The climate of Tres Cantos is typical for continental Spain. Summers are warm, with maximum temperatures of 33 °C which can sometimes reach the 39 °C. Night temperatures are more pleasant, because they decrease till 20 °C. There are cold winters, with minimum temperatures of 0 °C and below, and maximum temperatures of around 9 °C. Due to its geographical location, 22 kilometers from the capital, with its altitude and proximity to the mountains, the annual average precipitation is greater than in Madrid (above 500 mm).
Demographics
In 2004 the residential population of Tres Cantos was 38,882 according to National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, or INE) figures; however later estimates put the figure at around 45,000. Population growth has been in decline since the peak of the initial influx of residents in the early 1990s, however future plans for expansion are designed to cater for an eventual population of around 60,000.