Plaza de Honduras
The square takes its name from the Republic of Honduras, whose place name derives from the Spanish ‘honduras’ (depths), alluding to the deep waters of its Atlantic coast; the name was fixed on maps by Yáñez Pinzón and Díaz Solís around 1508. It belongs to the series of Retiro Park walks and squares named after Ibero-American republics, a pattern tied to the late-19th-century Hispano-American movement. At its center stands the Alcachofa Fountain (Ventura Rodríguez, 1776), moved here in 1880, and since 1973 it holds a bronze medallion of Francisco Morazán, donated by the Embassy of Honduras.
Plaza de Honduras occupies the southwest corner of the Retiro’s Great Pond and works as a pedestrian roundabout where the Paseo de Venezuela, the Paseo de Cuba and the Calle de Nicaragua meet. That cluster of American republics is no accident: from the 1880s a Hispano-American current spread through Spain, and the park’s walks began to take on names from across the Atlantic.
At the center rests the Alcachofa Fountain, which arrived from the Salón del Prado. Ventura Rodríguez had designed it in 1776, and in 1880 its move to the Retiro was carried out.
The name Honduras drags along an old legend. It is said that Columbus, in 1502, sighed his thanks to God for leaving those “honduras,” those deep waters. In 1973 the Honduran embassy gave the city a bronze medallion with the profile of Francisco Morazán, the leader born in Tegucigalpa in 1792. No record survives of the exact moment the square came to be called Honduras.