Glorieta Puerta de Toledo

Four different gates bore the name of Toledo at this southern edge of Madrid, leaping outward as the city stretched. The one that presides today over the Glorieta Puerta de Toledo came from a curious commission: around 1811 Joseph I Bonaparte ordered Silvestre Pérez to design a triumphal arch for his coronation. The French departure left the work halted, and the city commissioned another from Antonio López Aguado, dedicated to the national sovereignty of the Cádiz Constitution. Ferdinand VII, by then absolute king, rededicated it to his glory alone. It opened in 1827 and was the last monumental gate of old Madrid. It stands twenty-nine metres tall; granite holds the structure and white Colmenar limestone clothes the sculptures, with an allegory of Spain and trophies celebrating the French defeat. The gate always served to control passage: throughout the nineteenth century it was the only entrance through which livestock could be brought into Madrid. It was declared a site of Cultural Interest in 1996.

Under the gate’s foundations, at the moment of the first stone-laying, a box was buried with coins of the period, Madrid guidebooks, calendars and copies of the Josephine constitutions. On resuming the works under the Constitution of 1812, the City Council dug up the box and replaced the Bonapartist documents with a copy of “La Pepa” and medals of Ferdinand VII. When this same king abolished the Constitution in 1823, he ordered the box opened again and the constitutional text replaced with the Diario de Madrid of that date, the Guía de Forasteros and the Sarrabal de Milán, an almanac in popular circulation. The gate was thus, over fifteen years of works, a time capsule in which the regime in power literally rewrote the history buried beneath its feet.