Plaza de la Virgen Guadalupana
It recalls the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Marian devotion of the hill of Tepeyac and patron of the Americas, whose Madrid shrine stands beside this square.
The square takes its name from the church that presides over this corner of Ciudad Jardín, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe, known in the quarter as the church of the Mexicans. The temple brought to Chamartín one of the most widespread devotions in the Catholic world: it is said that in 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac, a figure wreathed in light appeared to the native Juan Diego and spoke to him in Nahuatl, asking that a temple be raised there.
The sanctuary is an architectural rarity. It was built in the 1960s by the Mexicans Enrique de la Mora and José Ramón Azpiazu with the engineer Félix Candela: De la Mora drew on the Virgin’s mantle, as if it were floating, and Candela translated that into concrete paraboloids, an octagonal floor more than fifty metres across held up by barely four pillars.