Plazuela de San Javier

The plazuela de San Javier is little more than a widening of the calle del Conde, in the Palacio quarter, and boasts a record: it is reckoned the smallest square in Madrid, bounded by barely two street numbers. On Texeira’s 1656 map it is already drawn but unnamed. The name came from a fresco. The house at number 7 of the calle del Rollo, belonging to the Jesuits' Colegio Imperial, bore on its façade the image of Saint Francis Xavier, the apostle of the Indies, and locals ended up naming the place after that saint painted on the wall. Beneath the cobbles lie centuries: excavations turned up pottery and human remains from the 11th and 12th centuries, within the earliest Islamic Madrid. The same plot was an inn for fish traders, later the traditional Mesón de San Javier until 1988, and it holds underground galleries used as shelters in the Civil War. Ramón Gómez de la Serna called it a nook where the most Madrid-like things are forged.

On 26 March 1932 the zarzuela Luisa Fernanda premiered at the Teatro Calderón in Madrid, with a libretto by Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández-Shaw and music by Federico Moreno Torroba. The first act takes place expressly in the Plazuela de San Javier, opposite the house of the Duchess Carolina, lady-in-waiting to the Queen. The action is set in the final days of the reign of Isabel II, with the inn as the axis of the plot. The libretto fixes the set of the first act in detail: the inn at the back, an eighteenth-century house with a doorway on the left and the wall of a hanging garden on the right. The literary setting matches the real topography of the small square.