Plaza del Conde del Valle Suchil

The title comes from the Súchil valley, in southern Durango, where the Basque miner José Ignacio del Campo Soberón y Larrea amassed estates until Charles III made him first count in 1776. The place name keeps a Nahuatl root: xóchitl, flower. But the square honours not the founder but José María de Garay y Rowart, third count and mayor of Madrid for nine months in 1922. He restored the county in 1919 with a genealogy linking him to the first count through a never-documented kinship. A 2004 lawsuit alleging forgery came to nothing. Beneath the ground lies another memory. In the rectangle of Arapiles, Magallanes and Rodríguez San Pedro stood the Northern General Cemetery, dismantled in 1884. In 1994, while digging a car park on Arapiles, some 320 remains from a common grave came to light.