The Cut and the Quarter: Gran Vía to Chueca

Edificio Metrópolis

The Beaux-Arts landmark where Gran Vía begins, crowned by a winged Victory and a dome of thirty thousand gold leaves.

You are standing at the corner of Calle Alcalá and Gran Vía, looking at the building everyone photographs but few really see. The Edificio Metrópolis went up between 1907 and 1910, before Gran Vía itself was finished. Five houses were knocked down to clear this corner. The French architects Jules and Raymond Février won the commission with a Beaux-Arts design, and the Spanish architect Luis Esteve actually built it.

For sixty years a statue of the phoenix sat on top, the symbol of the insurance company La Unión y el Fénix that first occupied the building. When Metrópolis Seguros bought the place in 1972, the old owners took their phoenix with them to Paseo de la Castellana. The winged Victory you see now, by Federico Coullaut, went up in 1977. Look at the dome.

Those are thirty thousand leaves of twenty-four carat gold. The four figures on the columns below represent Mining, Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce. This was also one of the first concrete buildings in Madrid, though the stone cladding hides it completely. When you are ready, walk up Gran Vía.

The tall clock tower ahead belongs to the Telefónica Building.

Edificio Telefónica

Madrid's first skyscraper, built for the telephone company in 1929, where the first call between Spain and America was placed.

This was Europe's first real skyscraper. When the Edificio Telefónica was finished in March 1929, its eighty-nine meters made it the tallest building on the continent. Ignacio de Cárdenas, the architect, had studied the new towers going up in New York and brought that language home: a steel frame, fourteen high-ceilinged floors, and a stone façade dressed with baroque ornament that nods to Madrid's own architectural traditions. More than a thousand workers built it, at a cost of thirty-two million pesetas.

Before it even opened, on the thirteenth of October 1928, King Alfonso XIII placed the first transatlantic telephone call from inside this building, to President Calvin Coolidge in Washington. Look up at the clock. From 1967 until 2013 it glowed red. Telefónica changed it to blue to match the corporate brand.

It held the Madrid height record until 1953, when the Edificio España overtook it. When you are ready, keep walking west on Gran Vía. The square ahead is Plaza del Callao.

Plaza del Callao

The great plaza where Gran Vía's energy peaks, defined by the Capitol building's art-deco curve and its 1972 Schweppes neon sign.

You are standing in Plaza del Callao, the pulsing center of Gran Vía. The square opened with the third section of the boulevard in the 1920s, and from the start it was designed for crowds. The building that commands your attention is the Edificio Carrión, better known today as the Capitol. It went up between 1931 and 1933, designed by two young architects, Luis Martínez-Feduchi and Vicente Eced, who had absorbed everything happening in German expressionism.

See how the curved corner catches the light like the prow of a ship. That was deliberate. At fifty-four meters and fourteen floors, it was never the tallest building on the street, but it became the most recognizable. The Schweppes neon sign went up in 1972 and has stayed ever since.

When the building was restored in 2007, almost every other advertisement was stripped from the façade. The Schweppes sign and a small Vodafone sign on the roof were the only ones spared. Inside, the building originally held sixty-four apartments, a hotel, a cinema with nearly two thousand seats, and the first centralized air conditioning system in Madrid. The Vierendeel beams that span the cinema ceiling, thirty-one meters long and three meters deep, were the largest in the world when they were poured.

When you are ready, leave Gran Vía behind. Walk north up Calle de Hortaleza, which starts just off the square.