Plaza de los Mostenses

The friars who gave this plaza de los Mostenses its name were Premonstratensian canons, an order founded by Saint Norbert around 1121 at the French priory of Prémontré. The Latin name, “the place pre-shown,” recalls the vision that tradition says led Norbert there. In Madrid speech, that Latin shrank into “mostenses.” The friars reached this plot in 1611 and built a church that Ventura Rodríguez gave an admired façade. It did not last: in 1810 Joseph Bonaparte ordered it demolished to air out the old town, and from the void came first waste ground and then a market. Through the small square’s maze of alleys passed tenants of opposite stripes, among them Madrid’s first Conservatory of Music, whose name is still kept by the Travesía del Conservatorio. In 1875 an iron-and-glass market rose, specialised in Galician fish thanks to the nearby Estación del Norte; it was torn down in 1925 to open the third stretch of the Gran Vía. The present Rationalist market opened around 1945.

Francisco García Chico, the most feared agent of Ferdinand VII’s secret police, lived at number 20 of the square, on the corner of Calle Isabel la Católica. By dint of extorting liberals and enlightened figures, he amassed more than seven hundred paintings, among them some fifty works by Goya, two Velázquezes, three Murillos, a Rubens and a Dürer. Foreign travellers visited his house as though it were a public picture gallery. When the July 1854 revolution broke out, the crowd stormed the building. It did not find him in a first search; it was one of his former lovers who revealed his hiding place. García Chico, ill, was pulled from his bed and led from the Plaza de los Mostenses to the Plaza de la Cebada, where he was shot without trial.