Plaza de los Mostenses: King Joseph's Clearings
Why is it significant?
Stand in front of the plain, boxy market building in the square and read the shop signs around you. Spanish, Chinese, Filipino, Peruvian, Dominican, Bangladeshi... In a few square metres, half the world is buying its groceries.
Key Facts
| Place | Plaza de los Mostenses: King Joseph's Clearings |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaza de los Mostenses 1, 28015 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.42340, -3.70900 |
| Part of Walk | Dukes, Monks and an Egyptian Temple: Madrid's Conde Duque to Templo de Debod |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in front of the plain, boxy market building in the square and read the shop signs around you. Spanish, Chinese, Filipino, Peruvian, Dominican, Bangladeshi... In a few square metres, half the world is buying its groceries.
The name of the square comes from the Mostenses, the Premonstratensian canons, an order of priests founded in France in the twelfth century, whose convent of San Norberto once stood here. For two centuries the canons sang their offices here, in white habits, on what was then the very edge of town. It disappeared in 1810, and the man who erased it was a king.
Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's elder brother, was placed on the Spanish throne in 1808. Madrileños never forgave him for being French, but they had to admit that he cared about their cramped, dark city. He ordered convent after convent to be demolished to open up squares, light and air, and the people gave him a nickname that stuck: Pepe Plazuelas, Joe Little-Squares. Plaza de los Mostenses is one of his clearings, and so are several other well-loved squares in the centre.
In the nineteenth century the space was filled with a market of iron and glass, one of the first modern covered markets in Madrid. The plainer hall you see now replaced it in the twentieth century, while the Gran Vía was being carved through the streets just to the south.
Today the Mercado de los Mostenses is known across Madrid as the place to find ingredients nobody else sells: Peruvian chillies, Asian greens, Caribbean roots, Spanish ham beside Filipino sweets. It is the honest kitchen of a city where roughly one resident in five was born abroad. Now walk west, along the side street towards the open sky. At the end, a great square opens, with two famous Spaniards on horseback and on donkey.