Plaza de San Nicolás

Before the south front of the church of San Nicolás de Bari, in the heart of Habsburg Madrid, opens this irregular widening that takes its name from the church. And the church is worth pausing over: it is the oldest non-military building still standing in Madrid. The oldest part is the tower. Of brick, with blind arcading of Islamic design, it has raised its silhouette since the 12th century. Inside it holds a surprise: here in 1533 was baptised Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, future author of La Araucana, and in 1597 Juan de Herrera, chief architect to Philip II, was laid in the crypt. The church went through ups and downs that nearly consigned it to oblivion —⁠warehouse and barracks during the Napoleonic occupation⁠— until in 1825 the Third Order of the Servites rescued it, leaving it the name by which it is still known, San Nicolás de los Servitas. Today it is the personal Italian-speaking parish of Madrid.

The parish’s book of baptisms, opened in 1525, preserves the entry for Saturday 11 August 1533, noting the baptism of “Alonso, son of the lord Doctor Arzilla and of his wife Doña Leonor”. That Alonso was Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, who at the age of twenty-five would accompany García Hurtado de Mendoza’s expedition to Chile and would write La Araucana, the most widely read epic poem in Spanish of the sixteenth century.