Plaza Santa Bárbara

Plaza de Santa Bárbara appears drawn on Texeira’s 1656 map, but still without a name. It was then the edge of Madrid: here Calle Hortaleza ended and the Cerca de Felipe IV opened a brick portillo, and beyond it the open country began. The name was brought by the convent of the Discalced Mercedarians, founded in 1606, which Mendizábal’s confiscation wound up in 1836. What truly weighed on the neighbourhood’s memory rose across the way. Charles III commissioned from Ventura Rodríguez a pig slaughterhouse that in 1831 was turned into the Cárcel del Saladero. For half a century that building meant for 150 crammed in as many as 800: defendants, bandits, politicians and nine-year-old children. Mesonero Romanos spoke of the crowd of wretches heaped in those dungeons. Luis Candelas escaped it by bribing the jailers. It closed in 1884 and fell soon after. Today it is ringed by red-brick palaces, the Casa de los Lagartos with its sculpted lizards climbing the facade, and the Cervecería Santa Bárbara, which since 1966 has kept the name alive in everyday speech.

The priest Martín Merino, nicknamed Cura Merino, stabbed Queen Isabel II on 2 February 1852 in the basilica of Atocha as the queen went to present her newborn infanta. The queen’s corset absorbed the blade and the wound was reduced to a scratch. Merino was taken to the Cárcel del Saladero, on this square, where he was formally stripped of his ecclesiastical orders. Five days later, on 7 February, he was carried on the back of a donkey from the Saladero to the Campo de Guardias, where the garrote executed him at the very hour of the attack.