Plaza de Callao: The Hotel That Housed the War Correspondents
Why is it significant?
Stand in the middle of Plaza de Callao and turn slowly around: cinema façades, giant screens, the curved white prow of the Capitol building with its famous neon sign, and on the eastern side a big department store. That department store is where this walk really begins.
Key Facts
| Place | Plaza de Callao: The Hotel That Housed the War Correspondents |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaza de Callao 2, 28013 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41990, -3.70580 |
| Part of Walk | Avenue of Shells: Madrid Under Siege and the Road to Democracy |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the middle of Plaza de Callao and turn slowly around: cinema façades, giant screens, the curved white prow of the Capitol building with its famous neon sign, and on the eastern side a big department store. That department store is where this walk really begins. Because on that spot, in 1936, stood the Hotel Florida... and for almost three years it was the most famous hotel in the world for people who wrote about war.
The Florida opened in 1924, designed by Antonio Palacios, the same architect who gave Madrid its wedding-cake palace on Plaza de Cibeles. When the Civil War broke out in July 1936 and Franco's armies reached the edge of the city that November, the hotel filled with foreign correspondents. Ernest Hemingway lived here while reporting for an American news agency. Martha Gellhorn, the reporter who would later become his wife, had a room along the corridor. John Dos Passos passed through, and the photographer Robert Capa came and went with his cameras.
Madrid was a city under fire, and the Florida was hit by shells more than once. Hemingway wrote his only full-length play, The Fifth Column, in his room here in 1937, while the building shook. The title came from a boast attributed to the Nationalist general Emilio Mola: four columns were marching on Madrid, and a fifth was already waiting inside. Fear of that hidden fifth column, real and imagined, shaped every day of life in the besieged capital.
And then the whole hotel simply vanished. In 1964 the Florida was demolished to make room for the department store, and very little on the street recalls it today. Shoppers ride the escalators through the air where the correspondents once argued, drank, typed their dispatches and waited for the shelling to stop. Across the square, the Capitol, finished in 1933, is the survivor: the one building on this skyline the reporters would still recognise instantly.
Madrid has a habit of building over its memories rather than labelling them, and you will meet that habit again on this walk. So keep your eyes open for what is missing, as well as for what is there. Now walk east along Gran Vía, the broad avenue that the people of besieged Madrid gave a much darker name.