Eduardo González
The Plaza Mayor of Madrid has been hosting one of the most popular Christmas markets in Spain for more than a century and a half, and one of the most attractive for international tourism.
The history of our square began in the mid-14th century, when the King of Castile, Enrique IV, authorized the first free market in Madrid. For this purpose, two locations were chosen, one within the city walls, the Plaza de San Salvador (the current Plaza de la Villa), and another outside the city walls, the Plaza del Arrabal, located on a cart esplanade where merchants and goods from the roads to Toledo and Atocha converged.
The next important chapter in this story came in 1580, when Philip II commissioned Juan de Herrera (the architect of the Monastery of El Escorial) to draw up an ambitious urban plan to ennoble the appearance of the town, which he himself had made the seat of the Court in 1561.
By then, the Plaza del Arrabal had already displaced San Salvador as the main market square in Madrid, but its real coming-out took place in 1619, when – in the midst of the reign of Philip III and under the master hand of Juan Gómez de Mora – the remodelling works on the Plaza Mayor, the new popular name for the Plaza del Arrabal, were completed. Thanks to these works, framed in the aforementioned urban plan of Philip II, Madrid had just been provided with a place large enough to install the weekly market and to celebrate all kinds of social events, such as carnival battles, bullfights, acts of faith of the Inquisition and even public executions on the municipal gallows.
It was also in the 17th century when a Christmas market began to operate in its neighbouring Plaza de Santa Cruz, opposite the current headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where food (meats, vegetables or fruit), animals (mainly live turkeys and chickens), flowers, decorations and gifts were sold.
Over the years, the market gradually spread to Cavas, Puerta Cerrada, Calle de Toledo, Calle del Arenal and, of course, the Plaza Mayor itself, as recorded in 1765 by the playwright Ramón de la Cruz, one of the fathers of Madrid’s traditionalism, in his farce La Plaza Mayor por Navidad. The market was so successful that the authorities decided to put things in order and, at the same time, make some money. In the 19th century, the City Council issued a regulatory regulation that required all Christmas traders to apply for a sales license after paying a fee of five pesetas for “each square meter or fraction thereof in the Plaza Mayor, Ciudad Rodrigo Street, Zaragoza and Plaza de Santa Cruz.”
In 1860, the City Council moved the Christmas market permanently to the Plaza Mayor. From then on, and especially since the beginning of the 20th century, the merchants in the square began to incorporate new products into their stalls, from nougat and marzipan to zambombas and joke items and, of course, Nativity figures and Christmas trees. After the forced recess of the Civil War, the Madrid City Council prohibited the sale of food products in the Plaza Mayor in 1944 and ordered that the stalls be limited to joke items and Christmas decorations.
In 1962, the Christmas market in the Plaza Mayor became especially popular throughout Spain thanks to the film La gran familia, in which a desperate grandfather (Pepe Isbert) lost Chencho, his youngest grandson, in the middle of the crowd. The story ended happily and the phrase “Chencho, my son” became a reference in popular culture.
Today, the market brings together a hundred wooden stalls (since the eighties, when the awnings were replaced), run by fifty families and organized by the Plaza Mayor Christmas Market Association.
