Two Cannons on the Calle de Ferraz

On 19 July 1936 two field guns rolled into this street, positioned by Lieutenant Orad de la Torre and aimed at the barracks on top of the hill, because the government had just decided to arm the people.

The thousands who gathered around them hadn't come only for the barracks itself, because inside lay the bolts for fifty thousand rifles that the army had stored there earlier, and without those bolts the weapons being handed out to the crowd were little more than pieces of wood and steel.

What came next was a siege in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. Planes from the airfield at Getafe bombed the building, the cannons fired from this street, and residents watched from the windows right beside you. In the end white flags appeared at the windows, and as the crowd moved forward the shooting started again, and what happened inside after that cost hundreds of people their lives, even after the surrender.

The street you're walking down now has its porches, its bakers and its schools, and it had them back then too.

We follow the Calle de Ferraz until it opens onto the Plaza de España.