Plaza de los Carros

Whoever reads Plaza de los Carros on the blue sign today finds the name of a trade that vanished with the railway. There was no square here for centuries: Texeira’s map draws this ground as blocks of houses, and the gap opened around 1656, when several houses and a stretch of the Christian wall were torn down, its stone reused for the Chapel of San Isidro. The name comes from the bustle. While the Puerta de Moros was the passage for goods heading south, muleteers and carters unloaded here and porters distributed toward the Cebada market. Long-distance stagecoaches left from the square, until the train took that traffic away in the last third of the 19th century. The most surprising thing lies beneath the pavement. In 1984 archaeologists found an Umayyad-era water channel, a qanat running parallel to calle de Don Pedro and held to be a unique piece of al-Andalus hydraulic engineering on the Peninsula. In 2018 a stretch of 12th-century wall appeared, now visible inside a restaurant.