Spain paid tribute to victims of Europe's worst Islamic-linked terror attack on Sunday as the king unveiled a towering glass monument etched with outpourings of grief over the death of 191 people three years ago in crowded trains blasted with dynamite.
Spaniards fell silent at that memorial site, the bomb-hit Atocha rail station in downtown Madrid, and left candles and flowers at other spots around the city to remember March 11, 2004, when more than 1,800 were wounded in addition to the 191 killed.
"It is a day of immense pain," said Pilar Manjon, leader of a March 11 victims' association, who lost her 20-year-old son Daniel as he traveled to attend engineering classes at a Madrid university.
King Juan Carlos, Queen Sofia, senior government officials and an invitation-only crowd of several hundred people stood under bright sunshine listening to a lone cellist play the sad strains of Song of the Birds, a composition by Pablo Casals meant to be a call for peace.
The ceremony was short and staid. There were no speeches.
Some wiped away tears at the ceremony outside the station, one of four targets in the string of 10 backpack bombs that struck the commuter trains.
The king placed a laurel wreath at the foot of the monument: a 10-story glass cylinder with a transparent inner membrane bearing messages of condolence that Spaniards and other people left at Atocha and elsewhere after the attacks -- on notes left at makeshift memorials or on a computer terminal set up for them to record their thoughts.
These messages, in Spanish and other languages, are only visible from a chamber beneath the hollow, oval-shaped monument.
"Tomorrow I will leave home just like you did, in order to continue your journey," one inscription reads.
Another, in English, said, "Words are not enough."
The monument is the second to the people killed in the Madrid attack.
On its first anniversary, Spaniards inaugurated what they call the "Forest of Remembrance," a grove of olive and cypress trees in the city's main park, the Retiro.
It features 192 trees -- one for each of those killed on the trains and another for a special forces officer who died when seven suspected ringleaders blew themselves up to avoid arrest as police closed in on their suburban Madrid apartment three weeks after the attacks.
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