Avenue of Shells: Madrid Under Siege and the Road to Democracy

From the vanished hotel of the war correspondents and the shelled Telefónica tower to the bullet holes of 1981 and Picasso's Guernica: Madrid from the siege of 1936 to the transition

Madrid · 10 stops · 24 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Plaza de Callao: The Hotel That Housed the War Correspondents

   Plaza de Callao 2, 28013 Madrid, Spain

   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.

2. 2. Gran Vía: The Avenue of Shells

   Gran Vía 31, 28013 Madrid, Spain

   Pause on the pavement of Gran Vía, with its theatres, its rooftop statues and its endless river of traffic, and try to imagine it emptied: shop windows boarded up, sandbags piled against doorways, and people walking fast, close to the walls.

   From November 1936 the front line ran only a few kilometres west of here, through the Casa de Campo park and the new University City. Nationalist artillery dug in on the high ground of the Casa de Campo, on the hill called Garabitas, and its guns could reach the heart of the city. The long, straight line of Gran Vía, with the tall Telefónica tower at its middle as an aiming mark, was hit again and again. Madrileños began to call their showpiece street the Avenida de los Obuses... the Avenue of Shells.

   And yet the city refused to stop living. Cinemas along Gran Vía went on showing films through much of the siege, and people queued for them between bombardments. Trams kept running, cafés served whatever there was to serve, which was often very little. People learned the rhythm of the shelling the way other cities learn the timetable of their buses.

   The street's very name is a small map of Spain's twentieth century. Gran Vía was carved through the old town from 1910 onwards, swallowing hundreds of houses, and it took around two decades to complete. During the war, parts of it were renamed in honour of the Soviet Union, the Republic's main ally. After Franco's victory in 1939 it became the Avenida de José Antonio, after the founder of the Falange, and that is what the signs said for four decades. Only in 1981 did the city officially give back the name that everyone had kept using anyway: Gran Vía.

   So when a Madrileño of a certain age says Gran Vía, there are layers underneath the word... names, flags, and the memory of a street where you learned to listen for the whistle of an incoming shell. Keep walking east. The tall stone tower rising ahead of you, at the corner of Calle de Fuencarral, was the target everyone was aiming at.

3. 3. Telefónica Building: The Skyscraper in the Line of Fire

   Gran Vía 28, 28013 Madrid, Spain

   Tilt your head back at the tower on the corner of Gran Vía and Calle de Fuencarral: storey upon storey of pale stone and baroque ornament, stepping up to a height of almost ninety metres.

   When it was finished in 1929 for the national telephone company, it was the tallest building in Madrid, and for a while one of the tallest in Europe. Underneath the Spanish costume it is pure American engineering. The company was then controlled by the American giant ITT, the original plans came from the American architect Louis S. Weeks, and the young Spaniard Ignacio de Cárdenas dressed the steel skeleton in the decoration of old Madrid.

   In the siege, height became a curse. From the top floors, Republican officers could watch the front lines in the Casa de Campo and correct the fire of their own guns, so for the besiegers this was the most obvious target in the city. Shells struck the tower many times. The steel frame held, the building stayed in service, and Madrid kept talking to the world through its cables.

   Every foreign journalist's story had to pass through this building. The Republic's foreign press censorship office worked here, and one of the censors was the writer Arturo Barea, who later told the story of those nights in his memoir The Forging of a Rebel. Correspondents read their dispatches down the telephone line under the censor's eye, with the walls shuddering around them... the news of the siege literally left Madrid from inside the target.

   Photographers loved the tower for the same reason the gunners did: it was the one shape everyone recognised. Today the company's headquarters have moved to the edge of the city, and the old tower hosts the exhibition space of the Fundación Telefónica. From here, carry on along Gran Vía to the point where it flows into Calle de Alcalá, and look for the building crowned by a bronze goddess with a spear.

4. 4. Círculo de Bellas Artes: The City That Was Expected to Fall

   Calle de Alcalá 42, 28014 Madrid, Spain

   In front of you rises the Círculo de Bellas Artes, a tall stack of columns and balconies by Antonio Palacios, opened in 1926. On its roof, high above Calle de Alcalá, a bronze Minerva with helmet and spear has stood guard over the city since the 1960s.

   The Círculo is a private arts society founded in 1880, a place of painters, writers, masked balls and endless conversation. But its rooftop terrace is also one of the best viewpoints in Madrid. Look west from up there, past the domes and towers, and the horizon ends in a low green line: the Casa de Campo. In the autumn of 1936, that green line was the front.

   On 6 November 1936, with Franco's columns at the gates, the Republican government left Madrid for Valencia. The defence of the capital was handed to a Junta de Defensa under General José Miaja. Almost everyone, from foreign diplomats to the departing ministers, expected the city to fall within days. The story goes that some newspapers abroad already had their headlines about the fall of Madrid set in type.

   It did not fall. Militias, regular troops and ordinary citizens dug in at the University City and the Casa de Campo, and the first volunteers of the International Brigades marched through the centre of Madrid on their way to the front. The slogan painted on walls and banners was ¡No pasarán!, They shall not pass, made famous by the communist deputy Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria. The front then hardly moved for almost two and a half years.

   Holding on had a terrible price: hunger, cold winters without fuel, and air raids that made Madrid one of the first great European cities bombed from the sky. The siege ended only at the close of March 1939, days before the war itself. Now walk downhill, south, to the little Plaza de las Cortes and the grand hotel that faces Spain's parliament.

5. 5. Hotel Palace: From Belle Époque Ballroom to War Hospital

   Plaza de las Cortes 7, 28014 Madrid, Spain

   Facing the little Plaza de las Cortes stretches the long, cream-coloured front of the Palace hotel, all balconies and wrought iron, with the parliament building just across the square.

   It opened in 1912, in the confident years when Madrid wanted grand hotels to match Paris and London, and it was built to be one of the largest in Europe. Its heart is a round lounge under a dome of stained glass, where for decades bankers, diplomats, bullfighters and film stars took their tea. In the years before the war it was the place where Madrid went to be seen, a hotel of tea dances, banquets and visiting celebrities.

   In the summer of 1936 the luxury ended almost overnight. With the front only a few kilometres away, the Palace was turned into a military hospital, and the elegant salons filled with beds, surgeons and wounded men brought straight from the trenches of the Casa de Campo. Not far away, on the Paseo del Prado, the Ritz became a hospital too, and it was there, in November 1936, that the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti died of a gunshot wound received at the University City front.

   Forty-five years later, history crossed the square again. On the night of 23 February 1981, while armed men held the deputies hostage in the Congreso, the Palace became the base for the security chiefs who surrounded the building, and for the journalists who waited in its lobby through the night for any scrap of news. Phones rang constantly, rumours ran from table to table, and nobody knew how the night would end.

   So the same corridors saw two of the darkest nights of modern Madrid, and the same stained-glass dome survived both. Now cross the little square towards the bronze lions guarding the steps of the parliament, and look at the building that was the target that night.

6. 6. Congreso de los Diputados: The Bullet Holes of 23-F

   Carrera de San Jerónimo, 28014 Madrid, Spain

   Two bronze lions sit on their pedestals at the foot of the steps of the Congreso de los Diputados, and the story goes that they were cast from the metal of cannons captured in Spain's war in Morocco in 1860.

   The building itself, with its six-column portico, was opened in 1850 and has housed Spain's lower chamber ever since, through monarchies, a republic and a dictatorship. Under Franco, the Cortes that met here were a chamber without real power. Then, on 15 June 1977, Spaniards voted in their first free general election in more than four decades, and in December 1978 a referendum approved the constitution that still governs the country.

   On the evening of 23 February 1981, the deputies were voting to confirm Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as prime minister. At about twenty past six, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero of the Guardia Civil burst into the chamber with armed men, pistol in hand, and ordered everyone to the floor. Shots were fired into the ceiling. Television cameras kept rolling. Almost every deputy dropped behind the benches. Three did not: the outgoing prime minister Adolfo Suárez, the deputy prime minister General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, who stood up to confront the intruders, and the communist leader Santiago Carrillo, who stayed in his seat.

   The night that followed was the longest of the transition. In Valencia, tanks under General Milans del Bosch rolled into the streets. Then, after one in the morning, King Juan Carlos appeared on television in uniform and ordered the armed forces to uphold the constitutional order. By midday on the 24th the deputies walked out free, and the coup had failed.

   Inside the chamber, the bullet holes in the ceiling were never filled in. They were left on purpose, a reminder written in plaster above every debate. Four years before that night, though, the transition had already been tested by violence of another kind. Walk south through the narrow streets to Calle de Atocha to find where.

7. 7. Calle de Atocha 55 and Antón Martín: The Atocha Lawyers and the Embrace

   Plaza de Antón Martín, 28012 Madrid, Spain

   Find the sculpture in Plaza de Antón Martín, a group of figures seen from behind, holding one another tightly, and then glance a few doors back up Calle de Atocha to number 55: an ordinary residential building with shops at street level. Together, the two tell one of the most important stories of Spanish democracy.

   On the night of 24 January 1977, little more than a year after Franco's death, gunmen from the far right climbed the stairs to a law office at number 55. The lawyers there specialised in labour law and defended workers; they were close to the Comisiones Obreras union and to the Communist Party, which was still illegal. The attackers were reportedly looking for a union leader who was not in the office. Instead, they opened fire on the people they found.

   Five people died: the labour lawyers Enrique Valdelvira, Luis Javier Benavides and Francisco Javier Sauquillo, the law student Serafín Holgado and the office worker Ángel Rodríguez Leal. Four others were badly wounded and survived. That same week saw other killings in Madrid, and many feared the fragile transition would collapse into a spiral of revenge.

   What happened next surprised almost everyone. The Communist Party, which could have called its supporters out in anger, called for silence instead. A vast crowd followed the coffins through central Madrid without slogans and without incident, a disciplined farewell the whole country watched. In April 1977 the government legalised the Communist Party, and in June Spain voted. Many historians see that silent funeral as one of the moments that made a peaceful transition possible.

   The sculpture, placed here in 2003, is based on El abrazo, The Embrace, painted in 1976 by Juan Genovés and reproduced on posters calling for an amnesty for political prisoners: nobody's face, everybody's gesture. Whether that embrace was ever complete is still debated, and parliament passed laws on the memory of the war and the dictatorship in 2007 and again in 2022. From the square, walk down Calle de Santa Isabel, past the old Cine Doré, home of the national film archive, to the huge granite building with glass lift towers at the bottom.

8. 8. Museo Reina Sofía: Guernica Comes Home

   Calle de Santa Isabel 52, 28012 Madrid, Spain

   Face the long granite front of the Museo Reina Sofía and its glass lift towers, which run up the old walls like two transparent ladders. This was once the General Hospital of Madrid, begun in the reign of Charles III. Today it guards the most famous painting of the twentieth century about war.

   On 26 April 1937, aircraft of Germany's Condor Legion, with Italian planes, bombed the Basque town of Guernica on a market day. In Paris, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish Republic to paint a mural for its pavilion at that year's International Exposition. He threw out his first ideas and in a few weeks painted Guernica: almost eight metres of black, white and grey, a screaming horse, a bull, a mother with a dead child, a lamp, a broken sword.

   Then the painting went on a long exile. It toured to raise money for Spanish refugees and ended up in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso declared that it should return to Spain only when the country had democratic liberties again. He died in 1973, two years before Franco. The canvas finally arrived in Madrid on 10 September 1981, a few months after the failed coup, and was first shown in the Casón del Buen Retiro behind bulletproof glass. In 1992 it moved to this building, where it has stayed.

   There is a famous story, perhaps too perfect to be true, that during the German occupation of Paris an officer looked at a photograph of Guernica in Picasso's studio and asked: did you do this? And Picasso answered: no... you did.

   For many Spaniards, the painting's arrival was a sign that the transition was real: the last exile of the war had come home. Inside, it hangs with Picasso's preparatory studies displayed nearby, so you can watch the horse's scream take shape. From the museum, cross the busy roundabout to the old railway station with the great iron roof.

9. 9. Atocha Station: The Morning of 11 March 2004

   Plaza del Emperador Carlos V, 28045 Madrid, Spain

   Take in the great iron-and-glass arch of the old Atocha station, a cathedral of rivets from 1892, with the newer station buildings spreading behind it towards the tracks.

   On the morning of Thursday 11 March 2004, at the height of the rush hour, ten bombs exploded on four commuter trains heading into Madrid: at Atocha, near Calle de Téllez, and at the stations of El Pozo and Santa Eugenia. Nearly two hundred people were killed and around two thousand injured. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Spain's history, carried out by a jihadist cell, three days before a general election.

   Most of the victims were ordinary commuters: students, cleaners, office workers, people from more than a dozen countries who lived in the working-class suburbs along the line. That morning, neighbours near the tracks opened their homes, taxi drivers turned into ambulances, and the queues to give blood stretched down the streets. Candles and handwritten messages covered the station halls for weeks.

   The next evening millions of people marched in cities across Spain, and in Madrid they walked in the rain. Memorials followed. In the Retiro park, a small wooded hill called the Bosque del Recuerdo, the Forest of Remembrance, was planted, one tree for each life. Beside this station, in 2007, a tall glass cylinder was raised, its inner skin printed with messages of condolence left by the public; it has since been dismantled.

   Thousands of travellers pass through Atocha every hour, most of them without knowing any of this, and perhaps that is how a city goes on living. But many Madrileños still go quiet when they hear the date, eleven of March, simply 11-M. For the last stop, walk uphill along the side of the station to a brick bell tower among the trees, on Calle de Julián Gayarre.

10. 10. Panteón de Hombres Ilustres: Tombs of Murdered Prime Ministers

    Calle de Julián Gayarre 3, 28014 Madrid, Spain

    Walk up to the brick bell tower and the arcaded cloister beside it: this is the Panteón de Hombres Ilustres, the Pantheon of Illustrious Men, one of the quietest corners of central Madrid.

    It was built in the 1890s as part of a grand new basilica for the Virgin of Atocha that was never completed. Only the cloister and the tower rose, and they became a resting place for statesmen. Inside lie the marble tombs of three prime ministers: Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, José Canalejas and Eduardo Dato, with sculpture by masters like Agustín Querol and Mariano Benlliure.

    What the three have in common is how they died. Cánovas was shot by an Italian anarchist at a spa in the Basque Country in 1897. Canalejas was shot in 1912 in Puerta del Sol while he looked into a bookshop window. Dato was killed in 1921 by gunmen firing from a motorcycle near the Puerta de Alcalá. Three heads of government murdered in twenty-four years... political violence had become a habit long before the Civil War turned it into catastrophe.

    Next door, the Basílica de Atocha, home of one of Madrid's most venerated images of the Virgin, was burned in the first days of the war and rebuilt in the years after it. Fire, siege, dictatorship, a coup, the bombs of 2004: the city you have just crossed carries all of it, mostly without plaques.

    That is why the years after 1975 still fascinate historians around the world. In a short time, a country with that history negotiated its way from dictatorship to a democratic constitution, through elections, an amnesty and the Moncloa Pacts of 1977, and held firm on the night of 23-F. Spaniards still argue about the price and the silences of that road, and that argument is itself a sign of democracy. Atocha station is just behind you when you are ready to go... and this is where our walk ends.