Arco de Cuchilleros

From this arch a staircase takes us down, because the Plaza Mayor lies quite a bit higher than the street behind it. That's why the houses along the Cava de San Miguel, to your left, stand six or seven storeys tall on this side and only three on the square side, with their lowest floors sitting in what was once the city moat.

Halfway down the street below, at number seventeen, there's an inn from 1725, started by a French cook and his wife. The wood-fired oven they installed back then is still burning, even through the months when the restaurant had to close during the pandemic. In 1987 the Guinness Book recognised Botín as the oldest restaurant in the world that has never stopped running.

As the story goes, a young Goya washed the dishes here before he became court painter, and Hemingway set the closing scene of his first novel at a table on the upper floor. Of those two tales, only one can actually be proven.

We head down the stairs and follow the Cava de San Miguel until the glass market hall rises up on our right.