The news that rode out of the city

While the sentences were being carried out in Madrid, people fled the city carrying the news with them. That very afternoon, two mayors of the village of Móstoles, Andrés Torrejón and Simón Hernández, signed a call asking all of Spain to take up arms. Murat thought he had frightened the Spanish into submission, and instead he set off a war that would last six years.

How many died that single day has long been disputed. When a historian went through every available archive in 1908, he arrived at four hundred and nine names, thirty-nine of them soldiers. The second of May is now the holiday of the Madrid region, and on that day the square we passed this afternoon fills right up to its edges.

And with that the walk is done, a few minutes from the square where it began.

The Gran Vía in front of you cost fourteen streets, among them a few where fighting went on that morning, and how that breakthrough came about is the subject of our walk past the icons of Madrid. The same street came under artillery fire a century later, and we have a walk about that too.

From this square it takes five minutes to walk down the Calle de Preciados to the Puerta del Sol, where the walk began. Metro Callao lies right beneath your feet.