Hotel Florida

On this corner stood a hotel with two hundred rooms until 1964, every one of them with its own bathroom and, during the war, one of the few addresses in Madrid with hot water. The Hotel Florida was built in 1924 by the architect Antonio Palacios, its façade made entirely of marble, and during the Spanish Civil War it became home to the foreign press.

Ernest Hemingway took rooms 113 and 114. Martha Gellhorn stayed here too, along with John Dos Passos, Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, and dozens of other correspondents who wrote about the siege of the city from these rooms. At night they tapped out their pieces on the upper floors while machine-gun fire rattled outside.

There was a sharp edge to that life. While the city lined up for rations, the correspondents ate in the canteen of the Hotel Gran Vía a few hundred metres away, and that inequality is one of the things later readers of their reporting have pulled them up on.

The hotel survived the war but not the peace, because in 1964 it was flattened to make way for a department store. A plaque is all that remembers it.

We cross the Gran Vía and follow it east, until a tower with a clock rises up ahead of us.