Calle del Dos de Mayo

Barely a few metres of cobblestone separate Calle de San Vicente Ferrer from the Plaza del Dos de Mayo, and down that short stretch runs the street that recalls the 1808 uprising. It once bordered, to the south, the Monteleón Artillery Park, the arsenal where it all began. On the morning of 2 May 1808, captains Luis Daoíz and Pedro Velarde defied their commanders and opened the depot’s gates to the people of the Maravillas district. With two cannon, a hundred-odd soldiers and some two hundred civilians, they held out for hours against nearly four thousand imperial troops. Both died that day. The palace the cannon came from was left in ruins, and on its plot the square that recalls the events was opened in 1869. The neighbourhood, once Maravillas, has been known since 1961 as Malasaña, after Manuela Malasaña, a seventeen-year-old seamstress executed in the French reprisals. Her street, together with those of Daoíz, Velarde and Monteleón, forms the ring of names the 1869 planning laid out around the square.