This municipal memorial, officially titled A las víctimas del Holocausto (“To the victims of the Holocaust”), stands in Parque Juan Carlos I, beside the Garden of the Three Cultures and next to the Vergel de los Granados, also known as the Jewish Garden. It was created as a public tribute to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War and emerged from a formal agreement between the City of Madrid and the Jewish Community of Madrid, approved by the municipal plenary in 2005.

The monument was inaugurated on 15 April 2007 in a ceremonial act attended by the Mayor of Madrid (Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón) and representatives of the Jewish Community of Madrid, as well as other civic and diplomatic figures. The City of Madrid presented it at the time as the first Holocaust memorial monument erected in Spain.

Description and symbolism

The memorial is a conceptual sculptural ensemble whose dominant element is a vertical, abstracted projection of the Star of David, formed by multiple triangular steel prisms arranged around a central hexagonal core. The formal description notes Hebrew inscriptions on the central structure and a set of perforations that reinforce the symbolic geometry of the composition.

The star rises from a stepped, star-shaped platform clad with weathered wooden railway sleepers, explicitly referencing the deportation trains associated with the extermination process. Two additional components flank the platform: a semicircular arrangement of 44 vertical railway sleepers, evoking a field of gravestones, and a schematic yet expressive figure of a father holding a dying child, also built from wooden sleepers.

A corten-steel pedestal along the approach bears a bronze commemorative plaque. Its inscription dedicates the monument to the victims of the Holocaust, “in memory of the six million Jews murdered during the Shoah,” and also remembers Spanish victims, Roma victims, and others murdered in the Nazi extermination camps. The plaque includes the inauguration date alongside the Hebrew calendar date 27 Nisan 5767.

Official records describe the main element’s dimensions as 10.00 x 1.50 x 1.50 m, and identify the work as municipal property. Press reporting at the time also noted the monument’s approximate height (10 metres) and weight (around four tonnes), and credits the project to sculptor Samuel Nahón (Samuel Nahón Bengio) with architectural design by Alberto Stisin.