Madrid City Council live cams

The Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Madrid City Council, runs a traffic control centre that watches the city's streets through a network of fixed cameras. Its department for traffic management and enforcement, the Dirección General de Gestión y Vigilancia de la Circulación, uses them to follow congestion, roadworks and anything else that affects how people move around the city, and it shares the pictures with the public on Informo, the council's live traffic map.

Since 2014 the council has also published the cameras as open data on its portal, datos.madrid.es, in the dataset "Tráfico. Cámaras": a map file with the position of each camera and the latest still image from each one, released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0). The list runs to several hundred cameras, mostly on main roads and junctions.

A handful of them look over the places visitors come to Madrid for, and those are the ones this site shows: the Gran Vía from Plaza de España and from Callao, the Calle de Alcalá down to Cibeles, the Plaza de Cibeles, the Columbus monument in Plaza de Colón, and the Segovia Bridge with the Almudena Cathedral above Madrid Río. Each picture carries the camera's number and name and is stamped with the date and time, so you can always tell when it was taken. They are still images, not video, and the traffic centre can turn and zoom some of them, so a view may change from one picture to the next. On this site they are credited to the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, as the licence requires.