Plaza de Cascorro

Plaza de Cascorro was born of a demolition. It had been a tangle of alleys that Goya painted and Ramón de la Cruz used as backdrop for his farces. At one end huddled the “cork of the Rastro”, an old block that jammed the way to the Ribera de Curtidores; the wrecking crews tore it down around 1905 and the square opened in 1914. The name comes from Cuba and a rope. In 1896, during the siege of the village of Cascorro, the Madrid corporal Eloy Gonzalo volunteered to burn down a building from which the enemy was firing. He tied a rope around his body with a cold idea: so his comrades could recover his body if he fell. He set the building alight and came back alive. The bronze statue that recalls him, with torch, oil can and rope, was unveiled in 1902. The popular name fought its own battle. In 1913 the council imposed the name of Nicolás Salmerón, but people went on saying Cascorro for nearly forty years, until in 1941 the council gave in and made it official. Today the square is the head of the Sunday Rastro flea market.

The hero did not give his name to the place: it was the place that ended up being his. Eloy Gonzalo called himself “the hero of Cascorro”, not the other way round. When the magazine Blanco y Negro published his portrait on 30 January 1897, it presented him as “the soldier who has achieved the greatest popularity in this war”; a few months later he died of enterocolitis in Matanzas, without ever having returned to Madrid. The phrase attributed to him when he volunteered —⁠“I am a foundling and I leave no one to mourn me”⁠— appears in numerous chronicles of the time, but no primary source certifies it: historians regard it as part of the mythology built up around the character.