Plaza del Rey

Plaza del Rey, on the first stretch of the Gran Vía, in the Justicia quarter almost everyone calls Chueca. It appears on neither Texeira’s nor Espinosa’s maps: its form as a square arose in the 18th century, when the block around the Casa de las Siete Chimeneas was regularized. That 16th-century house is the oldest building here. Philip II gave it as a dowry to Elena, daughter of one of his huntsmen, and from that springs the legend of a ghostly lady who walks the rooftops —⁠fed when the Banco de Castilla found there the skeleton of a woman beside gold coins of that reign. Today it houses the Ministry of Culture. The name commemorates Ferdinand VII and his proclamation by the people of Madrid in 1808, after Godoy’s fall. The square had earlier been called del Almirante —⁠after Godoy⁠— and del Circo, after the Teatro Circo de Paul that operated in the mid-19th century. At number 7 the zarzuela composer Francisco Asenjo Barbieri died in 1894.

On 19 March 1808, when news reached Madrid of the fall of Godoy after the Aranjuez mutiny, groups of residents went along Calle Barquillo and, with the express permission of the province’s captain general, tore down the plaque bearing Godoy’s name that identified what was then the Plaza del Almirante. The event was recorded in the chronicles of the time: the favourite’s downfall began symbolically in this corner of Madrid before it was carried out politically. Mesonero Romanos described the entry of Fernando VII into Madrid on the following 24 March as a collective delirium; the square that would bear his name was the first stage of that popular euphoria.