The Tobacco Factory

The tall brick wall that takes up a whole block here belongs to a factory that opened around 1792 to make brandy and playing cards, and that was converted seventeen years later, during the French occupation, into a tobacco factory, a role it would keep for nearly two hundred years.

The people who worked here were women, the cigarreras, and there were many of them. In 1830 the factory counted three thousand five hundred, mostly daughters of this neighbourhood, who sorted, cut and rolled the leaves in shifts. On 11 February of that year they rose up against the director, and in a city with barely any industry this was an unheard-of sight: a labour conflict in which thousands of women stopped working all at once. The cigarreras remained a force in Madrid throughout the nineteenth century, with a reputation somewhere between feared and admired.

That the corralas, the old balconied tenement blocks, stand so close by is explained by this, because anyone who worked in this factory lived within walking distance.

Entry is free and the halls are open from Tuesday through Sunday, in the afternoon and early evening. Inside, a second story is waiting for you, about what became of the factory.