From this arch a staircase takes us down, because the lies quite a bit higher than the street behind it. That's why the houses along the Cava de San Miguel, to your left, stand six or seven storeys tall on this side and only three on the square side, with their lowest floors sitting in what was once the city moat.
Halfway down the street below, at number seventeen, there's an inn from 1725, started by a French cook and his wife. The wood-fired oven they installed back then is still burning, even through the months when the restaurant had to close during the pandemic. In 1987 the Guinness Book recognised as the oldest restaurant in the world that has never stopped running.
As the story goes, a young washed the dishes here before he became court painter, and set the closing scene of his first novel at a table on the upper floor. Of those two tales, only one can actually be proven.
We head down the stairs and follow the Cava de San Miguel until the rises up on our right.
Sources. Story: esMadrid, Ayuntamiento de Madrid; Guinness World Records (1987); Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Memoria de Madrid. Photos: Francisco Sancha, the stone staircase of Cuchilleros, drawing in La Voz of 17 August 1929, Biblioteca Nacional de España, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Photo of the Arco de Cuchilleros: Luis García, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
