Pasaje de la Caja de Ahorros

Before there was a passage here, there was a building that never sat still. On its plot came in turn the Café de la Aduana, opened in 1882, the Ambos Mundos restaurant and a variety hall called Edén-Concert. All that nightlife vanished under Civil War bombing. Over that void the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Madrid raised its headquarters, an institution founded in 1702 by the Aragonese chaplain Francisco Piquer. Its new building opened in 1951 with a pedestrian passage linking Calle Montera with Calle de la Aduana and Calle de Alcalá, and the register named it after the entity that owned the property. The curious part is what might have been and never was. In 1901 José Grases Riera designed here the most ambitious passage in Madrid, with six galleries; in 1938 Fernando García Mercadal tried again. Neither was built, and the one walked today has the functional air of the 1950s.