Plaza de la Villa

The square sits on the heart of two overlapping Madrids, the Islamic and the medieval Christian, between the Puerta de Guadalajara and the Puerta de la Vega. From the 13th century it gathered the town’s civic life: the market, the council and the parish of San Salvador, whose porch sheltered the first municipal sessions. When that church decayed, the council sought its own seat. Philip IV granted permission in 1629 to build the Casa de la Villa, designed by Juan Gómez de Mora; the first plenary session in the finished building was held in 1693. On the eastern flank stands the House and Tower of the Lujanes, a 15th-century Gothic-Mudéjar complex that is Madrid’s oldest civil building. To the south, the Plateresque Casa de Cisneros of 1537 is joined to the Casa de la Villa by a raised passageway over calle del Codo. In 1891 the monument to Álvaro de Bazán by Mariano Benlliure was unveiled, with verses by Lope de Vega on its pedestal. The council left its seat here in 2007 when it moved to the Palacio de Cibeles.

After the Battle of Pavia (1525), Francis I of France was brought to Madrid as a prisoner of Charles I. According to a tradition recorded by Lope de Vega and other seventeenth-century chroniclers, the French king spent several days in the Torre de los Lujanes while the Alcázar was being made ready to hold him. The best-known anecdote of that episode —⁠that Charles I ordered a low door so the Frenchman would have to stoop to pass through, and that he entered backwards so as not to do so⁠— circulated for centuries as established fact. In 1861 the Royal Academy of History opened a case on the historical value of the tower when the City Council was planning to demolish it. An 1867 report by Pascual Gayangos and Pedro de Madrazo, drawn up after the works of 1866, determined that a deck of 44 playing cards found inside dated from 1574, that is, fifty years after the supposed royal stay, which invalidated that relic as proof. The debate over whether or not Francis I was in the tower has not been settled by documentation contemporary with the events.