Plaza de San Ildefonso

In the evenings you'll find locals perched on the kerbs here with a beer, and during the day children run around between the café terraces. This square is the heart of a neighbourhood that was simply called Maravillas until the 1980s, after the convent that once stood here.

Back in 1808 this marked the edge of the city. If you walked north from the Puerta del Sol, you'd pass through streets that grew narrower and poorer with every step, full of workshops, bakeries and rented rooms four floors up. These were the neighbourhoods that held out the longest, for the simple reason that the people here had little to lose when the French army came down their streets.

The street names around you give away how the area came to think about that day: Dos de Mayo, Daoíz, Velarde, Ruiz, Manuela Malasaña. Every one of them named after something that happened within a few hundred metres of this square.

We head back to the Calle de Fuencarral and carry on to number 78, where an elaborate stone doorway sits in the façade.