Cuartel del Conde Duque: The Royal Guard's Barracks

Why is it significant?

Face the enormous brick façade on Calle del Conde Duque and let your eye run along it, window after window, until it reaches the main door.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Face the enormous brick façade on Calle del Conde Duque and let your eye run along it, window after window, until it reaches the main door. And what a door: a riot of carved stone, curling volutes, trophies of flags and weapons, all piled up around the entrance as if the stone itself were celebrating.

This was a barracks, built from 1717 for Philip V's Royal Guard, the Guardias de Corps, the elite horsemen who protected the king. Its architect was Pedro de Ribera, the wild man of Madrid baroque, who loved exactly this kind of exuberant doorway. The building was huge, with three great courtyards, and its façade fills an entire street block. The street and the building take their name from the Count-Duke of Olivares, the all-powerful minister of Philip IV, whose family owned houses nearby.

Barracks, however, rarely stay barracks. In 1869 a fire destroyed much of the upper part of the building. The army slowly abandoned it, and by the second half of the twentieth century it was a decaying ruin that many expected to be demolished.

Instead, in the 1980s, the city restored it and gave it a new life as a cultural centre. Today the old courtyards host summer concerts, and the building holds the municipal archive, a historic library and a museum of contemporary art. Where cavalrymen once groomed their horses, students now sit with laptops and pensioners read the newspapers.

Before you go, step into the first courtyard and look back at the doorway from the inside. Ribera's exuberance is only on the outside: inside, the barracks is plain and practical. A show of power for the street, discipline within. Now walk down the street a little and turn left into a small, quiet square, where a convent of noblewomen has stood for more than three and a half centuries.