Iglesia de la Buena Dicha

Behind the church you're standing in front of there once lay a modest little graveyard, part of the Hospital de la Buena Dicha, which had stood here since 1564 and was run by a brotherhood of twelve priests and sixty-two laypeople who cared for the poor of the neighbourhood. Twelve rooms, and that was all.

On the second of May it filled right up, because the wounded from the surrounding streets were carried in here, and in that small graveyard behind the building the dead went into the ground, among them Manuela Malasaña and Clara del Rey, the woman who was killed at Monteleón.

The hospital is gone, and what you see now is a church from 1917 by Francisco García Nava, who designed a facade for it that sits somewhere between neo-Gothic, neo-Mudéjar and art nouveau, giving Madrid one of its most singular church fronts. It has been protected as a monument since 1994.

Entry is free and the door stands open around the services, late in the morning and late in the afternoon. If you find it open, a second story waits inside about what García Nava made behind that facade.