Plaza del Conde del Valle de Suchil

The plaza del Conde del Valle de Súchil bears the noble title of José María de Garay y Rowart, a lawyer who held the mayoralty of Madrid for a few months in 1922. He restored the county in 1919 after paying twenty-four thousand pesetas, and years later a researcher showed the file had been built on crooked genealogies: the Madrid count did not descend from the original one, a noble granted the title by Charles III in 1776 for the Súchil valley, in northern Mexico. The ground of the square holds another story. Until 1884 the Northern General Cemetery stood on this land. In 1994, while digging a car park on the neighbouring calle de Arapiles, the diggers struck some three hundred and twenty bodies in a common grave.