Back at the Plaza de Lavapiés

And so the walk comes back to where it started, on the square whose crowds now make sense to you.

Everything you saw along the way hangs by a single thread: people who lived side by side on far too few square metres because the work was here and the rent was low. The tanners by the slaughterhouse, the three thousand women in the tobacco factory, the families squeezed into thirty square metres around the courtyard of a corrala, and the households from dozens of countries who now live stacked above one another. In that sense the neighbourhood has never really changed its character, only its residents.

Metro Lavapiés sits beneath this square and takes you to the Puerta del Sol in three stops, where the city rose against Napoleon in 1808 and where that walk begins, and one stop further to the Gran Vía, the street that came under fire during the siege and has a walk of its own because of it. And if you'd rather stay, the streets you've just wandered give you more than enough reasons to.