Plaza de la Corrala

Plaza de la Corrala owes its name to the building that presides over it, one of the best-known corralas in Madrid, built in 1839. It is shaped like a C around a long, narrow courtyard, with wooden galleries resting on cast-iron columns. It was housing for those arriving from the provinces looking for work: each dwelling barely exceeded thirty square metres, and the toilet was shared by floor. The name of this type of building tells its own story. In the seventeenth century these courtyard dwellings were called “casas de corredor”; corrala, an augmentative of “corral”, took hold in Madrid speech to distinguish these tenements from ordinary farm corrales. The square is much younger than the corrala: it was born in 1973, when the demolition of the building closing the block on Mesón de Paredes left the courtyard visible from the street. Over that gap an open-air amphitheatre was laid out, which during the Veranos de la Villa festival has seen performances of light zarzuela. The complex was declared a National Monument in 1977.

At the San Cayetano street festivals of the 1970s, the square itself served as a stage even before there was a fixed platform: the neighbours took down the chairs from the galleries and carried them down to the courtyard to watch the performances from the balconies and from the ground, reproducing the model of the Golden Age comedy courtyards. The photographer Martín Santos Yubero recorded these gatherings and left a record of them in the Regional Archive of the Community of Madrid.