Plaza de Peñuelas

Before it was a square, this spot was hard ground and stone. A peñuela is a small crag, a rocky mound, and the area was scattered with them; the best known was the peñuela de Santa Isabel, beside the Campillo del Mundo Nuevo. In the mid-nineteenth century, outside Madrid’s toll wall, a shantytown of day labourers and craftsmen grew up here. By around 1860 the neighbourhood held hundreds of families, and a two-spouted cast-iron fountain was installed in the square. Residents drew their water from it, and life happened around it. That fountain still stands at the centre, apart from a gap between the 1980s and 1994. The old shantytown, long saddled with a bad reputation, is now a sought-after part of Arganzuela.