The Archbishop of Madrid has been given permission to develop a huge complex of five ecclesiastical buildings in parkland on the city’s west side.

But the development over the San Francisco cornisa threatens to destroy a vista that was immortalised on canvas by Francisco de Goya over two centuries ago.

The Spanish artist painted the iconic image of the city in his 1788 work, La Pradera of San Isidro. The masterpiece, which hangs in Spain’s national Prado museum, depicts locals enjoying the annual fiesta celebrating the city’s patron saint on the grassy slopes to the west of the city, an activity that is still carried out to this day.

The rare piece of leafy green space in the city centre dates from the 16th century, and would be bricked over by the church’s 79,000sq-m building plan, which includes 25,000sq-m of public land.

Residents and conservationists protested the project, which was given the green light by the conservative city council last month.

“No cars, no buildings, just a park in the cornice,” read signs hanging from balconies in the homes near the projected ‘City of the Church’.

For the landscape artist Angela Souto, “this cornice is the city’s most singular landscape characteristic.”

Ms Souto, a professor at the Madrid Superior Technical School of Architecture, says that “the cornice sits on a geological promontory that gives the city its personality; it is a landscape of enormous visual fragility, which is seriously threatened by this project.”

The complex, long a dream project of Madrid’s ultra-conservative archbishop, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, is to include a four-storey monastery, a three-storey residence for retired priests, a religious library intended as the basis for a future ecclesiastical university, offices, a day centre for the homeless, plus a 200-place carpark for use of clerics only.

Opposition councillors have fought the project for years and condemned last month’s decision as “a historic assault” on land that has remained unspoilt since the city was founded.

Milagros Hernandez, a councillor with Madrid’s United Left, said: “The municipal government team is giving out public city land to a private institution such as the Catholic Church, which wants to build on it its own private Vatican.”

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