Plaza de la Encarnación

Before 1611 there were houses belonging to the Marquis of las Pozas here. Philip III bought them to build, next to the Alcázar, a cloistered convent that Queen Margaret of Austria had vowed to found if the Moriscos were expelled. The vow fulfilled, the first stone was laid in June 1611, but Margaret died a few months later in childbirth, never seeing it. Her husband finished the work in her memory, and the people of Madrid nicknamed the complex “Las Margaritas.” A covered passageway linked the palace to the church so the royals could hear Mass without setting foot in the street; Joseph I had it demolished when he reorganised the Plaza de Oriente. The confiscation of church property expelled the nuns in 1842, and Isabella II’s court saved the building from demolition. Since 1965 part of the monastery has opened as a museum. In 1966 the bronze statue of Lope de Vega arrived in the square; the playwright had spent his last years in the neighbouring district.