Iglesia de San Marcos: Five Ellipses and a Battle

Why is it significant?

From the narrow street, look at the church's front: it does not stand flat, it curves gently towards you, like a page bending in the wind. Squeezed between apartment blocks, it is easy to walk past. Please do not. Remember the battle of Almansa from the Palacio de Liria?

Key Facts

Open the walk

From the narrow street, look at the church's front: it does not stand flat, it curves gently towards you, like a page bending in the wind. Squeezed between apartment blocks, it is easy to walk past. Please do not.

Remember the battle of Almansa from the Palacio de Liria? It was fought on the twenty-fifth of April 1707, Saint Mark's day, and it secured the Spanish throne for Philip V. To give thanks, a chapel dedicated to Saint Mark was put up on this spot. Some forty years later it was replaced by the church you see, built between 1749 and 1753.

The architect was the young Ventura Rodríguez, and this was his first great work. Rodríguez had studied the Roman baroque of Bernini and Borromini, and he played with it like a mathematician. The plan of the church is made of five ellipses that flow into one another, so that inside there is not a single straight wall to rest your eyes on. Walls, cornices and domes all ripple, and the whole space seems to breathe. The frescoes above are by Luis González Velázquez.

Ventura Rodríguez went on to become the most important architect of eighteenth-century Spain, designing fountains, palaces and cathedral façades all over the country. When he died in 1785, he was buried here, in the first church he ever built, under the ellipses he had drawn as a young man.

It is a perfect hidden gem: a royal victory, a young genius, his tomb, all tucked into a side street that most people use as a short cut. If the door is open, step in quietly and turn slowly in the middle of the nave. Then walk a couple of minutes south to a square that owes its very existence to a French king of Spain who loved knocking things down.