El Ángel Caído

The fountain in front of you carries one of the few public statues in the world that depict the devil, and Madrid has never been coy about it. Ricardo Bellver made it in 1877 and simply called it El Ángel Caído, the fallen angel, after a passage in John Milton's Paradise Lost where Lucifer is cast out of heaven.

The plaster model won a medal at the Paris World's Fair, after which it was cast in bronze and placed here, and the snakes coiling around the leg together with the face tightening mid-fall make it one of the few statues in Madrid that people linger in front of for more than a second.

Then there's the coincidence the city has never quite got over, because the pedestal sits at roughly six hundred and sixty-six metres above sea level. That is where we leave you, in a park that began as a king's garden and finishes with a fallen angel.

The Puerta del Ángel Caído beside you leads onto the Calle de Alfonso XII, and on the far side of that street begins the boulevard where Charles III lined up science, nature and art side by side. That line has a walk of its own, and it ends at the observatory a few hundred metres from here.

The Atocha metro station sits just under a kilometre to the southwest.