The majority of its Engineering Schools are consistently ranked as leading academic institutions in Spain in their fields, and among the very best in Europe.

It is no exaggeration to state that for over one and a half centuries great part of the history of Spanish technology has been written by the Schools of Architecture and Engineering of the UPM.

One of the oldest records of technological studies in Spain is the Royal Academy of Mathematics in Madrid, leaving aside the Quatrivium of arithmetics, geometry, astronomy and music, the four liberal arts, that form the base of the technical disciplines, which were studied in the monastic and cathedral schools and later in the medieval and renaissance universities.

The Royal Academy of Mathematics was created after the idea and personal initiative of King Philip II after his return from a visit to Portugal in 1582, where he realised that the Portuguese cartographers were more advanced than those in Spain.

The second relevant record of technological studies was the Corps of Army, Cities, Ports and Frontiers Engineers founded by King Philip V in 1711.

Although the Special School of Fine Arts was founded in 1845 as an independent entity, it was at the beginning under the inspection and monitoring of the Academy.

At present the Higher Technical School of Architecture is located in a modern building in the Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid.

French naval architects were taken on after intense negotiations and the centre was reopened in the Arsenal de la Carraca in Cadiz in 1848.

[8] Mercury was in those days an irreplaceable material for the amalgamation of silver, which was one of the key sources of wealth in Latin America, especially in Mexico.

This school started its activities in a similar historical context to that of other centres such as those in Saxony (Freiberg 1767), Hungary (Schmnitz 1770) and France (Paris 1778).

At the beginning of the 19th century, in 1802, the School of Civil Engineering, considered the best one in Spain, was founded at the initiative of Agustín de Betancourt, an outstanding representative of the eloquent restless and inquiring spirit of the Spanish Enlightenment.

At the beginning of the academic year 1889-90, students and professors continued their activity in the new building in Alfonso XII Street, where the School remained until it moved to its current location in the Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid.

A Royal Decree created the Special School of Forestry Engineering in 1835, although it did not start its activity until 1848 in Villaviciosa de Odón, Madrid.

The industrial engineers' lectures descend from the Patriotic Seminar of Vergara and the activities of the Economic Associations of Friends of the Country.

The Minister of Public Works, Manuel Alonso Martínez, founded the Central Agriculture School on 1 October 1855.

Later it was called National Agronomy Institute and today Higher Technical School of Agricultural Engineering of Madrid.

The school of engineering is now called ETSIAE (Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Aeronáuticos y del Espacio) and is the best institution in Spain to carry out aeronautical studies.

It combines mathematics and informatics subjects, focusing on fields where the two are most relevant to each other and stressing the interrelationships between the two disciplines to shape a degree course that is being successfully taught at leading world universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, the University of Oxford in the UK or Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France.

Since 14 September 1998 the Faculty of Physical Activity and Sport Sciences (INEF) was an affiliated centre and on 1 October 2003 was integrated to the University.