Chicote

Push through the revolving door at number 12 and you step into a room that has barely changed since 1931: curved banquettes, soft light, and an art deco bar designed by Luis Gutiérrez Soto. Perico Chicote opened Spain's first cocktail bar here, five years before the war.

He kept it open when the shells started falling. This was where the correspondents from the Hotel Florida ended their nights, where they swapped the stories the censor hadn't seen yet, and which Hemingway later turned into a short story. Between this door and the Telefónica building lay exactly the stretch of street where it paid to run.

That's the image of this street that stays with you, and it's also the one we end this walk on: people darting into a cocktail bar between two impacts, because life carried on while the front sat four kilometres away.

The siege held until the end of March 1939, and when it ended Madrid was the last great city to surrender. What came afterwards lasted thirty-six years.

Follow the Gran Vía to its end and turn right down the Calle de Alcalá, and within ten minutes you reach the Puerta del Sol, where the city rose against Napoleon in 1808 and where that walk begins. Metro Gran Vía is a hundred metres away.