Three fires and a closed square
The square burned in 1631, again around 1670, and most destructively in 1790, when something close to a third of it went.
Villanueva's rebuild after 1790 is what gives the square its character, and it was a change of kind rather than a repair. He closed it off: where streets had run into the corners he put monumental arches, nine of them, so that the square became an enclosed room rather than a crossroads. He also lowered the buildings. The work was finished by Antonio López Aguado and Custodio Moreno in 1854. The Arco de Cuchilleros, down the steps on the south-west corner, is the most dramatic of the entrances.
Two later interventions explain the look of the ground. Through the nineteenth century the square was a railed garden, with trees, fountains and lamps; the planting was stripped out from 1936 to recover the Habsburg appearance, after which cars took over, and an underground car park went in in 1968. The square was given a thorough restoration of facades, roofs and arcades in the mid-2010s, and its four hundredth anniversary was marked in 2017 with a projection across all four fronts.
What the square was for
Everything. It was the market, and the place where royal proclamations were read, where saints were canonised, where bullfights were held, and where people were executed.
That includes autos-da-fé, the public ceremonies of the Inquisition. The documented set piece took place on 30 June 1680, when a hundred and seventeen people were sentenced in this square and twenty-one were condemned to burn. Older accounts mention the Inquisition twice and then make a joke of it. It is better stated once, plainly, and left to sit: the arcades people now eat lunch under were built as viewing galleries, and this is what was being viewed.
One small correction: a reader is told they are unlikely to see a royal coronation here. Spain does not hold coronations. Monarchs are proclaimed before parliament.
The painted building
The north side is the Casa de la Panadería, the bakery house, which was the bakers' guild building and the municipal bread store, and from whose balcony the royal family watched what happened below. It has since held the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Royal Academy of History, and the city's archive and library. It is now the city tourist office, with the official city shop on the ground floor and its grand room used for civil weddings — not, as older accounts have it, a guild one can visit.
Its painted facade is the thing everyone photographs, and here is the surprise: the murals date from 1992. They are by Carlos Franco, commissioned in 1988 to replace badly deteriorated paintings of 1914, and their subjects are mythological — Cybele among them — chosen to chime with the square's baroque origins. The "historic" frescoes are younger than most of the people looking at them. The whole facade was restored again in 2020 and 2021.
The statue
The bronze in the middle is Philip III, begun by Giambologna and completed by Pietro Tacca in 1616 — so it is contemporary with the square, but it was not made for it. It stood elsewhere for more than two centuries and was moved here in 1848 on Isabel II's instruction. It was damaged in the early Franco years and restored in the 1950s.
Being there now
- The cafés under the arcades charge for the position, which is a fair exchange if sitting in the square is the point and a poor one if lunch is. The streets immediately off it — Cava de San Miguel, Cuchilleros, the lanes towards La Latina — are better value and just as old.
- The local ritual is a bocadillo de calamares, a squid roll, eaten standing at one of the bars on the streets leading out. It is not a tourist invention; it is what Madrileños eat here.
- The Christmas market fills the square from late November and is the single biggest annual event in it — stalls of figures for nativity scenes, decorations and novelties. For many visitors in December it is the reason to come, and no older account mentions it.
- A stamp and coin market is held on Sunday mornings under the arcades. Older accounts describe permanent haggling stalls, which do not exist.
- Pickpocketing is real here. The method is distraction in a crowd, and the crowd is thickest where the street performers are. Bags worn in front, nothing in a back pocket, phone off the café table. Older advice to avoid paranoia while exercising prudence is not advice.
The Puerta del Sol is five minutes east, the Palacio Real ten minutes west, and the Mercado de San Miguel — which reopened in February 2026 after three years of structural work — is immediately outside the north-west corner.
General practicalities for the city are on the Madrid page.