Plaza de José María Soler

The name recalls José María Soler y Díaz-Guijarro, a Madrid lawyer born in 1905 who in his final years served as the city’s first deputy mayor. Under his direction, between 1956 and 1961, the renovation that restored the architectural unity of the Plaza Mayor was carried out, known as the “Soler renovation.” A plaque thanking him can still be read on the front of the Casa de la Panadería. Soler died in July 1963, the year he received Madrid’s Gold Medal. That same summer the city council renamed in his memory a corner of the Hispanoamérica neighborhood that until then was called plaza de las Peonías, after the peony that grows wild in the nearby hills. The plaque invites confusion: there is another famous José María Soler, the archaeologist from Villena who discovered that town’s Treasure. This Chamartín square honors not the archaeologist but the deputy mayor who reordered Madrid’s monumental heart.