Plaza de la Paja & the Prince of Anglona's Garden

Why is it significant?

You are standing on a lopsided, sloping square with benches and trees, a heavy stone chapel at its upper end and, behind a modest iron gate, a little walled garden that most people never notice. It is hard to believe, but this quiet corner was once the busiest square in Madrid.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are standing on a lopsided, sloping square with benches and trees, a heavy stone chapel at its upper end and, behind a modest iron gate, a little walled garden that most people never notice. It is hard to believe, but this quiet corner was once the busiest square in Madrid.

Before the Plaza Mayor was finished in 1619, the Plaza de la Paja was where medieval Madrid bought and sold, gossiped and swore oaths. Its name means the Straw Square. One explanation says that parishioners delivered straw here to feed the mules of the chaplains of the nearby church of San Andrés. Another simply points to the hay and fodder traded in a town full of animals. Take your pick.

The stone building at the top is the Capilla del Obispo, the Bishop's Chapel, raised in the 1520s and 1530s by the powerful Vargas family. It was meant to house the body of Madrid's patron saint, San Isidro, a humble farm labourer of the twelfth century famous for his miracles. The Vargas clergy and the priests of San Andrés quarrelled for years over the saint, and in the end Isidro went neither way: since 1769 he has rested in the Colegiata on Calle de Toledo.

Now peek through that iron gate. The Jardín del Príncipe de Anglona is an eighteenth-century garden that belonged to the palace beside it, one of the very few private aristocratic gardens to survive in the centre of Madrid. For most of its life it was hidden from ordinary eyes, and only in the early twenty-first century did the city open it to everyone. Box hedges, a fountain, total silence, two minutes from the busiest tapas street in town.

And San Isidro brings us to food. Every May, on his feast, Madrid eats rosquillas, little ring cakes: the tontas, the silly ones, are plain, and the listas, the clever ones, wear a coat of sugar icing. Make your way downhill, a couple of minutes east, to the Plaza de Puerta Cerrada, where the most famous eating street of old Madrid begins: the Cava Baja.