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.