Calle Mayor

Calle Mayor links the Puerta del Sol with the Cuesta de la Vega over just above 700 meters, almost flat and almost straight, crossing the Plaza de la Villa. When Madrid became the capital in 1561 it was already the town’s main axis: the Catholic Monarchs rode it as a triumphal route, and in the 17th century it filled with courtly finery. It served both trade and display. The guilds spread out along its stretches, and at its eastern head the convent of San Felipe el Real raised its famous Gradas, the busiest gossip spot of the court, where news and rumor ran each morning. Though from the 19th century it yielded commercial weight to Calle de Alcalá, it kept its institutional air around the Plaza de la Villa, the old core of the town government.

On 31 May 1906, the anarchist Mateo Morral threw a bomb wrapped in a bouquet of flowers from the fourth floor of number 88 —⁠now 84⁠— at the royal carriage in which Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia were returning from their wedding. The bomb grazed the tram cables and fell among the spectators: 23 people died and more than a hundred were wounded; the king and queen were unharmed. In 1908 a monument to the victims was erected in front of the building; destroyed during the war, it was replaced in 1963 by the present one, the work of Federico Coullaut-Valera.