Plaza de Colón

Plaza de Colón was first called Plaza de Santiago and only took its present name in 1893. Before that, its northern end on the Paseo de Recoletos was occupied by the new Mint that Isabella II inaugurated in 1861. The idea of raising a monument to Columbus here went back a long way. An 1864 law fixed this spot, and a national competition chose Arturo Mélida’s neo-Gothic pedestal; the statue, in Carrara marble, was carved by Jerónimo Suñol in Rome. The unveiling was set for January 1886, but the death of Alfonso XII suspended it. The whole work waited until 12 October 1892, the fourth centenary of the discovery. The Mint did not survive here: its building came down in 1970, and on the empty site the Jardines del Descubrimiento were created in 1975. A remodelling shifted the monument, and it took until 2009 for the statue to return to its central place in the Castellana roundabout.