Plaza de Tirso de Molina

Before bearing a playwright’s name, this ground belonged to the friars. In 1564 the convent of Our Lady of Mercy was founded here, growing to house more than a hundred monks. To that community came in 1600 a young man who would enter history as Tirso de Molina, though nothing suggests he lived here steadily beyond those first months. The Mendizábal confiscation ended the convent in 1836. In 1840 the mayor Olózaga planted trees and fixed a plaque with a pointed name, Plaza del Progreso (Progress Square), until in 1939 the Francoist authorities rewrote the sign as Plaza de Tirso de Molina, burying that liberal memory in passing. The most unsettling episode is kept by the metro: during the works of 1920 the labourers ran into some two hundred skeletons of friars from the old conventual cemetery, and today a lit urn displays bone fragments behind a plexiglass panel, in full view of anyone waiting for the train.