Bakery House

Story

In Plaza Mayor stands out a unique building: two slate towers, mythological frescoes on the facade, the only one without red walls. Let me tell you what happened here.

Fifteen hundred ninety. Philip the Second orders an official bakery for the new square: to control the price of wheat, supply the court, avoid hunger.

Diego Sillero builds it here. Bakery below, royal quarters above. Madrid's bread was dispatched from these walls.

Sixteen seventy-two. An August fire devours the building. Tomás Román rebuilds it in seventeen months.

Claudio Coello and Donoso paint baroque frescoes in the royal hall.

Then in seventeen ninety came the third fire. Three-quarters of the square burned. The Bakery House survived intact.

Juan de Villanueva arrives to rebuild — and uses this building as a model. Its height, its proportion, its arcades dictate the new square. What was once a bakery becomes the measure of Madrid.

In nineteen eighty-two a strong storm destroys the original seventeenth-century baroque frescoes. Forty years later, in nineteen eighty-eight, Carlos Franco repaints them from scratch: Cibeles, Bacchus, Cupid, tritons.

They are not a restoration — it's a new canvas on the same wall. Three and a half meters high, six months of brushstrokes.

Inside: baroque vaults on sixteenth-century foundations, the central balcony where kings watched bullfights, the coat of arms of Charles the Second carved in Genoa.

Today civil weddings and tourism occupy the rooms. Listen to the complete guide and I'll tell you about it.