Sight Name: Plaza Mayor
Sight Pic: index.php?module=Photoshare&type=show&func=viewimage&iid=130
Intro: Madrid's Plaza Mayor is a handsome, colonnaded, seventeenth-century square, packed with life and tourists, and lined with pavement cafés. It is a pedestrian traffic nexus, a popular venue for concerts and other performances and a favourite spot for buskers to torture residents. For, in spite of the municipal offices, it is still residential, real, lived-in, so lacks that museum feel.
Body of the text: Like other plaza mayors (most Spanish cities have one, and many are architecturally similar), Madrid's Plaza Mayor is considerably larger than it appears, a trick of perspective - the buildings which make up its sides ("pavilions" in Plaza Mayor jargon) are higher than you think, creating a kind of feeling of intimacy, heightened by the predominant redness of the walls. You will enter through one of several archways (nine, Wikipedia informs me, I have never counted) in the corners and sides and probably be struck by the statue in the centre of the square (Philip III). There are so many performances in the Plaza Mayor these days that you will probably see a stage somewhere, as well, whether ready, being put up or being taken down - residents are beginning to protest about this publicly.

The Plaza Mayor is rectangular, nearly 130 metres long by 95 metres wide, delimited by its four-storey pavilions, (five if you count the attics). Again, there is a trick of the eye, here, as the ground storey is hidden by the collonades, so that the buildings look as if they were only three floors high. Each of the two long sides of the rectangle has a handome building in the middle, the south side containing the Casa de la Carnicería (literally, the "Butcher's House"), which now houses a tourist information office, among other municipal things. The north side has the Casa de la Panadería, the Baker's House, colourfully decorated by murals depicting mythological figures such as Cibeles (a Greek fertility goddess - strictly speaking, she is called Cybele in English, but she has a special place in Madrileñan hearts, so we'll leave her in Spanish here). They look 18th-century, and it is a surprise to learn they date from 1992 - I like them, though not everyone does.

That both buildings should have culinary names is not coincidence. For, hundreds of years ago, the Plaza Mayor was the city's main market square. It came into being outside the mediaeval city, where the Calle de Toledo (the road from Toledo) was met by the Calle de Atocha, in what was then called the "Plaza del Arrabal," meaning "Square in the Outskirts." Its buildings were demolished on the order of Philip II in 1580 to be replaced by new ones in keeping with Madrid's recently acquired status of capital of Spain, according to a design by Juan de Herrera (largely responsible for the Royal Seat of El Escorial). Completed in 1619, its residents had almost no time to settle in before the first of the three fires which were to raze it to the ground in the next two centuries - it was not until the last of its reconstructions, in 1854, that it was to acquire its present, lower height and become a complete rectangle.

Although modern residents may grumble about the frequency of events held there, the Plaza Mayor was used as a public space from the outset, as the city's main market and as the stage for bullfights, public executions (beheadings in front of the Casa de la Carnicería, the more gruesome but more humane garrote vil in front of the Casa de la Panadería) and autos-da-fe. These days, apart from the concerts and performances put on there, it is the site of an enjoyable coin-and-stamp market on Sunday mornings, and the location for Madrid's annual Christmas fair, where Christmas-tree decorations and nativity scene figures are sold alongside fancy-dress masks and joke items like those cushions that make rude noises when you sit on them and exploding cigarettes. For Spain's April Fool's day does not fall in that month, but on December 28th - the Day of the Holy Innocents, commemorating or lamenting Herod's most dastardly deed.
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