Plaza del Conde de Miranda

For centuries this corner of Habsburg Madrid was named not after a count but after two stone male figures crowning the doorway of the palace that presided over it. People called them the savages —⁠perhaps Native Americans, perhaps mythological beings⁠— and the place became known as the Plazuela de los Salvajes. The palace was built by Juan Zapata y Cárdenas in the 16th century, one of Madrid’s first Renaissance buildings, and passed from the counts of Miranda to those of Montijo. In 1913 it was the scene of a famous crime: a captain walled a man up in one of its rooms, betrayed by fresh plaster that rang hollow. The palace was demolished in the 1920s. All that survives, to the south, is the still-cloistered Corpus Christi convent, nicknamed las Carboneras after an image of the Immaculate Conception said to have appeared in a nearby coal shop. The square’s name, like so many in Madrid, came from the building before the person: it points to the Miranda lineage rather than to any one count.