Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport opened on April 22, 1931, built on 330 hectares of land northeast of Madrid near the then-town of Barajas. The original airfield was little more than a grass circle marked with the word 'Madrid' in white to guide pilots, and the first terminal held just 30,000 passengers a year. Regular commercial service didn't begin until 1933, when Líneas Aéreas Postales Españolas, the predecessor to Iberia, launched scheduled routes to Barcelona and Seville.

The airport grew steadily through the postwar decades. A new National Terminal, now T2, opened in 1954. By the 1970s, the arrival of the Boeing 747 and a surge in tourism pushed traffic to 4 million passengers a year, prompting construction of what is now Terminal 1. In 2000, work began on Terminal 4 and its satellite building T4S, designed by architects Antonio Lamela, Richard Rogers, and Luis Vidal. The complex opened in February 2006, winning the Stirling Prize that same year, and added 2 new runways to bring the total to 4, enabling up to 120 operations per hour.

Today, MAD is the busiest airport in Spain and Europe's fifth-busiest, handling 68.1 million passengers in 2025 across 5 terminals. It is the primary hub for Iberia, Iberia Express, and Air Europa, and one of the world's most important connecting points between Europe and Latin America. The airport sits within Madrid's city limits, just 13 kilometres northeast of Puerta del Sol. It was renamed in 2014 to honor Adolfo Suárez, Spain's first democratically elected prime minister after the Franco dictatorship.