Plaza de Daoíz y Velarde

Before there was a square here, there was a commercial failure. In 1861 the Madrid Docks and Customs Company rose on the old Calle del Pacífico —⁠today Avenida de la Ciudad de Barcelona⁠—⁠, to store iron, timber and provisions a step from Atocha station. The business barely lasted a few years. The State took over the buildings and in 1878 ordered the Artillery and Supply barracks built there. The compound was named the Daoíz y Velarde Barracks, in memory of the two captains of the uprising of 2 May 1808. Of that military ensemble its main gate survives, raised in 1922 and now protected. The City Council bought the complex in 1981 and, after a long refurbishment completed in 2013, the present square remained, with the Barracks Fountain inside it, in the Pacífico neighborhood. The two names that christen it belong to a single day and a single death. Luis Daoíz y Torres, from Seville, and Pedro Velarde y Santillán, from Cantabria, were artillery captains stationed at the Monteleón Park. At dawn on 2 May 1808 they disobeyed orders to stay put, opened the park to the armed populace and stood up to the French troops. Both died that day, and their resistance became the symbolic spark of the Peninsular War.