Plaza del Emperador Carlos V

The great traffic junction that opens up southern Madrid was called Glorieta de Atocha for centuries, after the gate and shrine that marked it. This was one of the town’s historic exits, on the road to the convent of Nuestra Señora de Atocha. The gate was pulled down in 1850. The present name arrived in 1941, when the city council dedicated the space to the emperor and, in passing, avoided confusion with the nearby calle de Atocha. The choice carries a nuance: the man honoured reigned in Spain as Charles I, but the square recalls him by his German crown, the fifth of his name. Madrileños went on saying Atocha, mainly because of the train station. Anyone who crossed the junction in the 1960s remembers an illuminated fountain from 1963 and a flyover people nicknamed the “scalextric”, demolished in the mid-1980s.