Ms Ayuso drove home the advantage gained in reopening the economy early to slash regional business taxes to zero and attract investment from all over Spain to the capital. Almost one in four businesses created in the country this year has started in Madrid, with Ms Ayuso saying that she is channelling a “cultural, political and economic renaissance” in the city.

“If Madrid is not free, it is no longer Madrid. All I have done is let Madrid be Madrid,” she said. “There is a Madrid way of life, and it’s about being out on the street and following your dream.”

Madrid only became Spain’s richest region three years ago as it benefited from instability in Catalonia. That primacy has been entrenched by Ms Ayuso’s free-market policies, which she concedes are radical but insists are not uncaring.

She accepts the first lockdown, in March last year, was the right thing to do “because we didn’t know what we were dealing with”. But now her government has vowed to “test, test, test” to tackle all future upticks, as well as monitoring Covid incidence levels through an early-warning system based on analysing waste water.

Madrid has suffered badly, with more than 6,000 of its 16,000 death toll made up of elderly care home residents during the first wave.

Ms Ayuso’s early response included an ill thought-out plan to use private ambulances to service care homes, which led to accusations of favouritism because the owner of the business was a family member of a senior PP politician. She recently used her majority to cut short an investigation into the disaster by Madrid’s regional parliament.

Despite those difficult days, she said she never had doubts that her decision to end lockdown was the right one.

“I received an unprecedented level of pressure, both politically and in terms of the media. I was insulted and called a murderer,” she said. “But time has shown I was right because we were clear about what we were doing. Since the regions took back control of the health situation, infections in Madrid have tailed off.

“At first in the UK, action was taken late after a period in which decisions were not taken. Then it seemed to go the other way and there was a change of approach. We didn’t waver from our path.”

As things stand, the strategy is working. Madrid’s current seven-day cumulative infection rate stands at 67 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to a national average of 92.