Plaza de Lavapiés

Anyone who walks down to the Plaza de Lavapiés arrives, without knowing it, at the bottom of a funnel. The streets Jesús y María, del Olivar and del Ave María pour their slopes into this point, the lowest in the quarter. Before Madrid was paved, rainwater followed these channels to the square and escaped from there down the Embajadores stream. That vertex where everything converges gave the square its role as market and gossip-ground, and almost certainly its name too: the low place where the water gathered. At the heart of the story is the fountain. Its first monumental version was raised by the Italian sculptor Rutilio Gaci in the time of Philip III, already drawn on Texeira’s 1656 map. In 1850 the statue of the shepherd Endymion was added, a marble by Manuel Pereira. When the waters of the Canal de Isabel II reached the quarter, the fountain was dismantled, and the Endymion set off on its own journey to the Museum of the History of Madrid. The square also trod the boards. In 1769 Ramón de la Cruz premiered the sainete Manolo, which begins at the door of a Lavapiés tavern; from it came the “manolo,” the cocky young man of the quarter who became an unmistakable Madrid type. Since 2006 the Teatro Valle-Inclán has given the square back that theatrical calling.