The letters in the pavement

In the evening this is one of the busiest streets in the centre, and by day you can read it. Set into the paving are quotations from Spanish literature, cast letter by letter in brass, from Cervantes and Lope de Vega to writers who came much later.

At the crossing with the Plaza de Matute you'll find a line by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, a nineteenth-century poet whose words almost every Spaniard knows by heart: volverán las oscuras golondrinas, the dark swallows will return. The inscriptions are made so carefully that in 2015 a historian devoted a study to them, examining the texts with the method normally used on Roman inscriptions.

The collection is still growing. For a long time it was mostly men in the pavement, until the city added quotations from Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosalía de Castro and María de Zayas, three of Spain's great women writers.

On the south side of the Plaza de Matute, the Calle de Matute drops down towards the Calle de Atocha.