Plaza de San Miguel

The parish of San Miguel de los Octoes stood against the medieval wall, between the Puerta de Guadalajara and the Puerta Cerrada. Its first patron was not Saint Michael but Saint Mark, until in the time of the Catholic Monarchs it changed dedication; the epithet “de los Octoes” already appeared in the 1202 charter. The church served the neighbourhood for over six hundred years and survived two fires that broke out in the Plaza Mayor. The final blow came with Joseph I’s demolition order of 1809, part of his drive to open up spaces in the old quarter. On the empty site sprang an open-air market devoted to fish, which Alfonso Dubé y Díez would roof over in 1911, looking to the Halles of Paris. The building opened on 13 May 1916 and is today the last survivor of iron architecture among the covered markets of 19th-century Madrid.