Plaza General Vara del Rey

The square stands on the old Cerrillo del Rastro, once home to the city’s main slaughterhouse. From the work of slaughtering cattle and dragging them across the ground came the name of the whole Rastro market. The old Casa Matadero, the oldest building around, still stands. In 1926 the city dedicated the space to the Republican journalist Antonio Zozaya, with a bronze plaque paid for by public subscription. The Franco regime renamed it in 1941 after General Vara de Rey, but Zozaya’s plaque was never removed: it remains there, above the Bar Santurce. Joaquín Vara de Rey died on 1 July 1898 defending El Caney, in Cuba, with some 550 men against nearly 7,000 American soldiers. Wounded in both legs, he was still giving orders from his stretcher when a bullet struck his head; only 84 defenders managed to retreat. Spain awarded him the Grand Laureate Cross of San Fernando, and the Americans themselves buried him with honors. Today the square marks the northern end of the Sunday Rastro.

The bronze plaque with the relief portrait of Antonio Zozaya, placed on the façade of number 14 at the time of the dedication and paid for by public subscription, was not destroyed when the Franco regime erased his name from the square in 1941. It stayed in that doorway for decades without anyone removing it, and remains visible today above the Bar Santurce. The Centro Virtual Cervantes writer Fernando Hernández Holgado called it a “small miracle” attributable to chance and to later generations' ignorance of its existence.