Plaza de la República Argentina

The name pays tribute to the Argentine Republic, a diplomatic gesture toward one of the countries most closely tied to the Spain of those years. Plaza de la República Argentina opened to traffic on September 9, 1942, as El Viso was taking final shape as a neighborhood of small villas and broad avenues. Almost no one uses the official name. People in Madrid know it as the square of the dolphins, after the fountain at the center of the roundabout. The architect Manuel Herrero Palacios conceived it as a three-lobed basin, and the sculptor Cristino Mallo modeled in bronze three pairs of dolphins mid-leap, some rising from the water, others diving. Mallo tended the detail down to the invisible: so the bronze would look like wet skin, the fountain used misters to keep the figures damp and jets that mimicked foam where the snouts entered and the tails came out. That mechanism was lost in a later restoration.