ABC Serrano

ABC Serrano is one of Madrid’s distinctive heritage retail properties, occupying the former headquarters of the historic ABC newspaper on Paseo de la Castellana. The 11,500-sqm specialty centre operates within a Mudejar-revival building completed in 1899 by architect José López Sallaberry, originally as the editorial offices of one of Spain’s longest-running daily newspapers. Pryconsa, the Madrid family-owned developer, converted the building into retail use in 1995 and has held continuous ownership since.

The format breaks with conventional Spanish mall typology. ABC Serrano operates as a vertical specialty centre with retail distributed across six floors connected by an internal atrium that preserves the building’s heritage interior. The architectural constraints define both the asset’s identity and its tenant strategy: large-format anchors and hypermarket programming are physically impossible, leaving the property to function as a curated destination for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle retail.

Tenant composition reflects the surrounding Salamanca district demographics, one of Madrid’s wealthiest residential neighbourhoods alongside the high-end retail corridor of Calle Serrano two blocks east. Cortefiel and Sfera (both El Corte Inglés group brands) anchor the apparel floors; H&M handles fast-fashion volume; Druni occupies the beauty floor at flagship scale; the upper levels concentrate Spanish specialty designers and lifestyle retailers. The tenant mix excludes mass-market international fast-fashion brands like Primark or Lefties, calibrating the asset to the surrounding catchment’s premium positioning.

For Pryconsa, ABC Serrano is the operator’s most prominent single retail asset and one of Madrid’s clearest examples of heritage adaptive-reuse retail. The property features regularly in architectural literature on Spanish heritage conversion, with the central atrium and preserved facade serving as benchmarks for Madrid’s broader stock of late-19th-century commercial buildings under similar conversion pressure.