Main Square

The square began as the plaza del Arrabal, the main market of the villa, at the meeting of the Toledo and Atocha roads outside the medieval walls, and in that period a first porticoed building, a lonja, was raised there to regulate the trading. It carried the name plaza del Arrabal when, having stood outside the medieval walled enclosure, it came to form the centre of the new quarters called el Arrabal, made by the eastward growth of the villa during the reign of Juan II of Castile. The market is dated to the sixteenth century in some accounts and to the fifteenth in others.

The court moved to Madrid in 1561, and Philip II commissioned Juan de Herrera to redesign the ground in the classical style; the demolition of the old square's blocks of houses began in the same year as the commission. The first building of the new square, the Casa de la Panadería, was begun in 1590 by Diego Sillero on the site of the old lonja. In 1617 Philip III entrusted the completion of the works to Juan Gómez de Mora, who finished the square in 1619.

From the outset the square was the villa's principal market, for food, supplied by the many butchers whom the Repeso kept under watch, and for other goods, with the chief guilds established under its arcades. It was also the stage for public spectacle: bullfights, autos-da-fé and public executions, for which the scaffold was set before the drapers' doorway when the sentence was the garrote, before the Casa de la Panadería when it was hanging, and before the Casa de la Carnicería when it was knife or axe. The beatification of San Isidro, patron saint of Madrid, was celebrated here.

On 30 June 1680 the square was the site of a major auto-da-fé, at which the Spanish Inquisition sentenced 117 people before a large public audience. Twenty-one were condemned to death by burning. More than half of the accused, and most of those executed, were conversos, Christians of Jewish descent, charged with Judaizing. The painter Francisco Rizi recorded the scene.

Three great fires have run through the square. The first, in 1631, was repaired under Juan Gómez de Mora himself. The second, dated to 1670 by some accounts and to 1672 by others, was made good by the architect Tomás Román. The third and worst broke out in 1790 and destroyed about a third of the square, with Sabatini directing the fighting of it.

The rebuilding was entrusted to Juan de Villanueva, who lowered the houses around the square from five storeys to three and closed off the corners, opening large arcades for access. One of them, the Arco de Cuchilleros at the south-west corner, takes its considerable height from the drop between the square and the Cava de San Miguel, and its name from the street of the knifemakers whose guild supplied the butchers established inside the square. The works ran on until 1854, continued after Villanueva's death by his pupils Antonio López Aguado and Custodio Moreno. Above the centre of the Casa de la Panadería is a stone blazon with the arms of Charles II; the arms of Portugal are absent from it, which places the carving after 1668, the year the Spanish Crown recognised the independence Portugal had held in fact since 1640.

The square has carried a series of names that track the turns of Spanish politics. Under the decree of 1812 requiring every plaza mayor in Spain to be renamed plaza de la Constitución it took that title, holding it only until 1814, when it became the plaza Real. It was the plaza de la Constitución again from 1820 to 1823, from 1833 to 1835 and from 1840 to 1843; in 1873 it became the plaza de la República; and from the Restoration of Alfonso XII in 1876 until the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera it was once more the plaza de la Constitución. It took that name again on the proclamation of the Second Republic and kept it until the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the popular name plaza Mayor returned and has held since.

The bronze equestrian statue of Philip III at the centre of the square was begun by Giambologna and finished by his pupil Pietro Tacca in 1616, a gift from the Grand Duke of Florence to the king of Spain, and it stood at first in the Casa de Campo. Queen Isabel II ordered it moved to the plaza Mayor in 1848. On the proclamation of the First Republic it was put into store against the risk of vandalism, and it was returned to the square when Alfonso XII came to the throne. In 1931, with the Second Republic proclaimed, an explosive device was pushed through the opening in the horse's mouth, the figure being hollow, and burst the animal's belly; the blast scattered a quantity of small bones across the ground, the remains of birds that had slipped in through the mouth and been trapped inside over the centuries. The damage was repaired and the mouth sealed. It has stood in the square since, apart from a short absence around 1970 and 1971 while the underground car park was built. By another account the statue was pulled from its pedestal and damaged in the early years of the Franco regime and repaired in the 1950s.

The Casa de la Panadería, which takes its name from the city bakery that first occupied it, was restored in 1880 to a project by Joaquín María de la Vega. The houses around the square were reformed in 1921 under Oriol, and again in 1935 by Fernando García de Mercadal. A general restoration in the 1960s closed the square to road traffic, replaced the Arab tile of the roofs with slate and put a car park beneath it. The last of the works, in 1992, was Carlos Franco's mural decoration of the Casa de la Panadería, which shows mythological figures including the goddess Cibeles. The square was listed as a bien de interés cultural on 20 February 1985. The Christmas market has been held here every December since 1860, and a stamp and coin market fills the arcades on Sunday and holiday mornings.