Mercado de la Cebada: Barley, Gallows and a Landlocked Sea

Why is it significant?

In front of you rises a long, slightly battered market hall whose roof is a row of rounded concrete vaults, like a string of giant loaves left to cool. Inside, butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers share the aisles with little bars. It looks humble.

Key Facts

Open the walk

In front of you rises a long, slightly battered market hall whose roof is a row of rounded concrete vaults, like a string of giant loaves left to cool. Inside, butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers share the aisles with little bars. It looks humble. Its square has one of the darkest histories in Madrid.

Cebada means barley. From the sixteenth century this square was the city's grain market, and in a capital that ran on mules and horses, barley was fuel. In 1875 an elegant iron-and-glass market was built here, and in 1962 it was replaced by the building you see now.

But the square was also a place of execution. On the seventh of November 1823, General Rafael del Riego was hanged here. Three years earlier his military uprising had forced King Ferdinand the Seventh to accept a liberal constitution. When the king took back absolute power with the help of a French army, Riego was dragged to this square in a basket pulled by a donkey. The march that bears his name, the Himno de Riego, became the official anthem of Spain's Second Republic more than a century later.

Now a more cheerful paradox. Madrid lies around three hundred kilometres from the nearest sea, and yet it is obsessed with seafood. Locals like to call their city the best port in Spain. Fresh fish came in on mule trains packed in ice and seaweed, later overnight by rail, and today Madrid's wholesale fish market is said to be one of the largest in the world. The city's most iconic snack is a crusty roll stuffed with fried squid rings, the bocadillo de calamares... in a place without a beach.

One more thing: the neighbourhood around you is called La Latina after Beatriz Galindo, a scholar nicknamed the Latin woman because she taught Latin to Queen Isabella the Catholic and founded a hospital nearby around 1500. Now cross Calle de Toledo and walk east for a few minutes to a small square guarded by a bronze soldier.