The Mythical Animal That's No Longer on Madrid's Coat of Arms

A dispute that ended up on a coat of arms

The oldest surviving symbol of Madrid, from 1212, has no strawberry tree: it's just a she-bear walking with seven stars on her back, the same emblem that, according to tradition, the town's militia carried into the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. The tree was added ten years later, in 1222, to settle a dispute between the Council and the Church over the use of the woodlands Alfonso VIII had granted Madrid in 1202: the Church kept the walking bear, the Council got a bear rearing against a tree — later specified as a strawberry tree — with both sides also claiming its fruit. That division is where the nickname the city has carried ever since was born.

The snake a chronicler turned into a dragon

In 1569, when the Puerta Cerrada was torn down to widen the passage, a relief carved into the main keystone came to light. The town chronicler, Juan López de Hoyos — years later the teacher of a young Cervantes — described it as "a fierce and fearsome dragon." People started calling that gateway the Puerta de la Culebra, the Snake Gate, and not by chance: in the very drawing López de Hoyos included in his chronicle, the supposed beast is nothing more than an ordinary grass snake. The legend caught on anyway.

Crown after crown

In 1554, Charles I honored Madrid with the title of "crowned and imperial" town, and the coat of arms gained an open imperial crown. That wasn't the last crown it got: in 1822, the National Militia stood up to the Royal Guard in defense of the Constitution, and Ferdinand VII rewarded the town with a civic crown of oak leaves interwoven in garnet, which was added to the coat of arms decades later. Two different crowns, two different political episodes, crammed into the same small space of a coat of arms.

The older, the more ornate

In the mid-19th century, the City Council reworked the coat of arms and made it more elaborate than ever: it split it into quarters, kept the bear and the strawberry tree in one, placed the 1822 civic crown on top, and revived, gilded and with a quarter all its own, the creature López de Hoyos had seen carved on the Puerta Cerrada three centuries earlier. It was the most ornate version Madrid's coat of arms ever had, and also the one that lasted longest: over a hundred years, well into the 20th century.

1967: the committee that said no

That year, the City Council commissioned a report from the Real Academia de la Historia. Its president, Dalmiro de la Válgoma, traced the creature's origin back to that 1569 keystone and concluded that its presence on the coat of arms was, quite simply, a mistake with no historical basis. On 28 April 1967, the city council in full session approved the coat of arms that identifies Madrid today: a silver field, a strawberry tree in green, a black bear rearing up, a blue border with seven silver stars and, at the crest, the old royal crown. The creature and the civic crown vanished that same afternoon, after nearly a century on the city's official coat of arms.