Plaza de Cuzco

The roundabout owes its name to the Andean city of Cuzco, in Peru, old capital of the Inca empire and later one of the main cities of the viceroyalty. The city set that name on 21 October 1953, as this stretch of the extended paseo de la Castellana was taking shape. The northward extension of the Castellana, laid out as a straight line of just over five kilometres, was planned with several squares along it, and two of them, both circular, were given the names of Peruvian cities: one would be the Plaza de Cuzco and the other the Plaza de Lima, a few hundred metres to the south. The name ended up marking the whole area: the hotel, the office complex and the metro station took it up, and “Cuzco” came to mean both the square and its surrounding towers and offices.