Plaza República del Ecuador

The Plaza República del Ecuador pays tribute to the Andean country, as the neighbouring streets do with other nations of the continent. The whole quarter, in the heart of Chamartín, was conceived as a map of Spanish America drawn over Madrid: walking through the area you move from Lima to Cuzco, from Perú to the Dominican Republic. The name travels far. Ecuador took its name from the imaginary line that splits the Earth in two, measured precisely in its own territory by an eighteenth-century expedition; that work weighed so heavily that, on gaining independence in 1830, the young republic chose to be called after the line that crosses it. The square is a piece of that geography transplanted north of Concha Espina.