Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport officially opened on April 22, 1931, built on land northeast of what was then the small municipality of Barajas to replace aging airfields at Getafe and Carabanchel. Commercial flights did not begin until May 15, 1933, when a Fokker trimotor inaugurated scheduled service. Those first routes, to Barcelona and Seville, were operated by LAPE, the state carrier that would eventually become Iberia. The airport suffered significant damage during the Spanish Civil War and had to be rebuilt after the conflict. Expansion came steadily: a National Terminal opened in 1954, international capacity grew through the 1970s, and by the 1980s the airport was handling tens of millions of passengers annually.

The most transformative chapter arrived in 2006. Terminal 4, designed by architects Richard Rogers, Antonio Lamela, and Luis Vidal, opened on February 5 of that year. Its undulating bamboo-lined roof, cascading skylights, and kilometre-long vista of colour-coded structural columns won the 2006 Stirling Prize, architecture's most prestigious British honour. T4 and its satellite building T4S together added over 750,000 square metres of space and capacity for 35 million additional passengers per year. The airport's name was changed in March 2014 to honour Adolfo Suárez, Spain's first democratically elected prime minister.

Today, MAD operates 4 parallel runways across 2 orientations, handling up to 120 aircraft movements per hour. In 2025, it processed 68.1 million passengers, making it Europe's fifth-busiest by that measure. Iberia and Air Europa maintain their primary hubs here, and the airport describes itself as Europe's leading gateway to Latin America, holding roughly 31 percent of the European market for transatlantic traffic to that continent. Sitting just 13 kilometres northeast of Madrid's historic centre and connected directly by Metro Line 8, it is as much a part of the city's infrastructure as its rail network.