Plaza de Chueca

Las Salesas·Justicia

Name adopted in 1943 in honour of the Madrid composer Federico Chueca y Robres (1846–1908), author of zarzuelas of the género chico. Before then the square was called Plaza de San Gregorio Magno, after a statue of Pope Gregory I that stood at the entrance to the estate of the Marquesses of Minaya, on the site later occupied by the open space.

When Mesonero Romanos published his tour of Madrid’s streets in 1861, this square did not yet appear on any map. The site was occupied by La Galera, a women’s prison since 1818, and the gardens of the Dukes of Frías. The square was born of an urban rearrangement and took its name from an image of Saint Gregory the Great that adorned the estate of the Marquesses of Minaya. In 1943 the city council renamed it in honour of Federico Chueca, born in 1846 in the Torre de los Lujanes. His life turned on an imprisonment: arrested on the Night of San Daniel in 1865, he composed a set of waltzes from memory in prison, drawing the piano keys on the table. Barbieri orchestrated them and Chueca left medicine for good. With La Gran Vía (1886) and Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente (1897) he signed the peaks of the género chico. The square is small, but popular speech stretched the name to cover the whole area. Since the 1990s the LGBTIQ+ community has revitalised the district, and the square became the symbolic heart of Madrid’s Pride.

Its names

  • Plaza de San Gregorio Magnoca. 1860-1943
  • Plaza de Chueca1943-actualidad
Sources (10)

Crossings