Plaza de la Armería

Beneath this square sleeps something a thousand years older than the palace that presides over it. Digging between 1999 and 2000 for the Royal Collections Museum, archaeologists uncovered some seventy metres of the northern wall of the Mayrit rampart, the Umayyad Muslim Madrid, with its Sagra gate, one of the three entrances to the medina. The solemn square tourists see rests on the city’s original entrance. The name, though, comes from a vanished building. For three centuries the Royal Armoury stood here, which Philip II ordered built to house the arms collection inherited from his father, and which he bound to the Crown by will so it could never be sold. Everything burned on the night of 9–10 July 1884; almost the whole collection was saved, but the ruins were demolished, and on the cleared plot the present square was laid out, completed in 1892. Today the esplanade is caught between the palace façade and the Almudena Cathedral: a square that is at once the king’s threshold and the roof of a buried Arab gate.