Plaza de Ramales

Beneath the ground of this square beats one of Madrid’s oldest churches. The church of Saint John the Baptist already appeared in the 1202 charter and was consecrated in 1254, with three naves and a Romanesque apse. From 1609 it was the Alcázar’s parish and held baptisms and ceremonies of the Royal House. The square was born of an urban whim of Joseph Bonaparte: between 1810 and 1811, when the axes linking the Royal Palace to the Puerta del Sol were opened, the church fell under the wrecking bar. The gap was called plaza de San Juan until 1841, when the council renamed it after the Battle of Ramales. The subsoil held surprises: the 1999 excavations brought to light the apse foundations, eighteen Muslim silos and al-Andalus pottery. When the square was pedestrianised in 2005, the outline of the lost apse was carved into the pavement, like a ghost drawn on the ground. At the centre, a monolith by Fernando Chueca Goitia recalls that Diego Velázquez was buried here in 1660; when the church was demolished, his bones were lost forever.

Diego Velázquez died on 6 August 1660 and was buried the next day in the Fuensalida chapel of the church of San Juan. With the demolition of 1811, his remains disappeared. In 1994, during restoration work at the convent of San Plácido, two seventeenth-century mummies came to light: a man of about 61 dressed in the habit of the Order of Santiago and a woman of about 58, the very ages at which the painter and his wife Juana Pacheco had died. In 2004 a document surfaced signed by Gaspar de Fuensalida, a close friend of Velázquez, in which he donated 3,000 ducats to the convent of San Plácido, which strengthens the hypothesis that he himself moved the remains before the demolition. The identity has never been verified by conclusive forensic evidence.