Plaza de la Independencia

The square is named after the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1814). It was conceived by Ángel Fernández de los Ríos in 1869, as chair of the City Council’s Works Commission that emerged from the Revolution of September 1868, around the Puerta de Alcalá. The final name broadened the initial reference —⁠Plaza de Zaragoza, for the sieges of 1808 and 1809⁠— to the whole war.

The journalist, politician and urban planner Ángel Fernández de los Ríos (Madrid, 1821 – Paris, 1880) drew this square in 1869. He had just come out of the September 1868 Revolution as councillor and chair of the Works Commission, and he looked to Paris for inspiration: he took as his model the Place de l’Étoile that Baron Haussmann had reshaped. The Parisian radial split into twelve axes; he cut them to six when the time came to build. The first name he proposed was Plaza de Zaragoza, remembering the city that withstood the two French sieges of 1808 and 1809. In the end the name broadened to cover the whole war, and so it stayed: Plaza de la Independencia. The work ate into a strip of the Retiro and forced the demolition of the last stretches of the wall that Philip IV had raised in 1625, the same ones that flanked the Puerta de Alcalá. With that demolition the gate stood for the first time as a free-standing arch, loose in the middle of the square.

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