Censorship on the fifth floor

On the fifth floor of the tower rising above you sat the foreign censorship office, where no report left Madrid before someone had read it word for word. Arturo Barea, a Republican official who ran the press bureau during the siege, and Luis Rubio Hidalgo went through every line from every correspondent before the telephonists downstairs opened an international line to Paris, London or New York.

Barea had strict orders, so anything that gave away exactly where a shell had landed was cut, because the artillery up on the Garabitas hill read the foreign papers just as closely and could use them to adjust its fire. Correspondents who wanted to tell a sharper story ran into a censor armed with a military argument.

The building was finished in 1929, one of the first skyscrapers in Europe and for years the tallest thing in Madrid, and that is precisely why it served both sides at once. The Republic used the roof as a lookout over the Casa de Campo park, while the other side used the tower as an aiming point.

We carry on to the junction with the Calle de la Montera and look there for the entrance to the metro.