The Gate of Monteleón

This is where the Monteleón artillery park once stood, and when the uprising broke out, the artillery captain Luis Daoíz had his orders in his pocket and decided to ignore them. He was forty-one, trained in Segovia, and once a prisoner of the very same French, who offered him a place in their army back then and got a refusal.

He arrested the French guard, threw open the gates, and handed out weapons to anyone who came for them, while his colleague Pedro Velarde brought in a company of volunteers and did his best to line up the citizens in some kind of order. Together they held off General Lefranc's attacks for a couple of hours with a handful of cannon, until reinforcements arrived from the palace a few streets away, where Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law and commander in the city, had his headquarters. Daoíz was struck from behind with a bayonet and then run through, Velarde took a shot to the heart at close range, and with that the uprising was over.

The brick arch in the middle of the square is all that remains of the barracks, because the site was levelled in 1868 while the city kept the main gate, and since 1932 the marble statue of the two officers, carved by Antonio Solá in Rome in 1830, has stood beneath it.

We leave the square on the north side and look for the Calle de Manuela Malasaña.