San Francisco el Grande: The Dome and the Young Goya

Why is it significant?

Stand in front of the pale stone façade with its three arched doorways and let your eyes climb to the enormous dome swelling up behind it. Madrileños call this church San Francisco el Grande, Saint Francis the Great, and for once a nickname in this city is an understatement.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand in front of the pale stone façade with its three arched doorways and let your eyes climb to the enormous dome swelling up behind it. Madrileños call this church San Francisco el Grande, Saint Francis the Great, and for once a nickname in this city is an understatement.

The story begins with a legend. Saint Francis of Assisi, so the tradition goes, passed through Madrid around 1217 on his way to Santiago de Compostela and founded a humble friary outside the walls. Nobody can prove it, but the friars stayed on this spot for more than five centuries. In the 1760s they decided to replace their old church with something worthy of the capital of an empire. A Franciscan lay brother, Francisco Cabezas, designed a circular church crowned by one gigantic dome... so gigantic that the works stalled for years, and it took the royal architect Francesco Sabatini to finish the job in 1784.

The dome is around thirty-three metres across inside, the widest in Spain and among the widest church domes anywhere in Europe. From the inside it feels less like a ceiling and more like a sky someone has decided to paint.

Now, the detail most visitors walk past. In one of the chapels hangs a large canvas painted between 1781 and 1783 by a provincial artist in his mid-thirties who was desperate to impress the court. His name was Francisco de Goya. It shows Saint Bernardino of Siena preaching to King Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon, and among the listeners on the right, one young man looks straight out of the picture, at you. Most experts read him as Goya himself, slipping his own face into the commission that he hoped would make his name.

In 1869 the liberal government even turned the basilica into a National Pantheon and carried the bones of great Spanish writers here in solemn procession. The idea faded within a few years and the remains went home. Now walk north, past the gardens, along the Carrera de San Francisco toward the old heart of medieval Madrid... and start getting hungry. From here on, this walk is about how Madrid eats.