Assessment of the air pollution problems in Madrid started with the creation of the department to fight against air pollution in 1968, using manual systems with 40 samplers which were collected daily and analysed in a laboratory.

The law for the protection of the air environment came into force in 1972 and was developed by Decree 833/75, 6 February. The application of both dispositions led to the declaration of part of the city of Madrid as an area of air pollution (30.12.1977). Given this situation, Madrid City Council decided it was necessary to give the department a monitoring device to know the city's a situation in real time and, as a result, set up the automatic system for monitoring air pollution in February 1978 with 16 remote stations and a central station, now called the control centre.

Since it was set up and to date, various enlargements and modifications have been made both to the number of remote stations and to the number of sensors for determining the concentrations of various pollutants. All these modifications and enlargements have adapted the system to the ever stricter European standards.

As a result of this increased demand of successive Directives and increasingly rigorous criteria for protecting health, a system was set up in the 1990s which updated and to a certain extent modified the traditional concept of a monitoring system, introducing one that was wider and that matched Community policies including monitoring, prediction and informing as fundamental parts of the fight against air pollution.

The system was financed by the European Union Cohesion Fund which provided 80% of the cost of the installation, valued at approximately €300,000.

This innovative concept arose as a result of the greater demands of the successive Directives, mentioned above, and of increasingly rigorous and stricter health protection criteria.

An integral system was implemented, basically consisting of three systems carrying out the concepts described above, monitoring, prediction and information, now fully operational.

In 2009, the Environmental Quality, Monitoring and Assessment Directorate approved, on 11 November, the adapting of the Madrid City Council air quality monitoring system to Directive 2008/50/CE, 21 May, relating to the quality of air and a cleaner atmosphere in Europe.