Few cities have a church quite like this one, and Madrid has exactly one. Where almost everything in the centre is baroque or shaped to match it, García Nava built a space here that leans towards art nouveau, with a single nave, small side chapels, and a choir above the entrance behind a stained glass window from the time it was built.
The best part is right above your head. Just before the main altar, a starry vault arches up with a skylight above it, painted in deep blue, letting the daylight fall exactly where you were already looking. The altarpiece below it is modernist down to the smallest detail, with stylised angels around an almond-shaped niche holding the Virgin.
Nothing remains here of the hospital or the little graveyard. That makes this the only spot on our walk where the past has disappeared completely under something new, even though this is still the ground where , a seamstress who became a symbol of the against Napoleon's troops, was buried.
Outside, we follow the Calle de Silva to the Gran Vía and turn right towards the Plaza de Callao.
Sources. Story: Boletín Oficial del Estado, description accompanying the monument declaration of 9 June 1994; Real Academia de la Historia, Diccionario Biográfico, entry Francisco García Nava; Hispanopedia, Iglesia de la Buena Dicha. Photos: Photo of the interior of the Buena Dicha: xGaztelu, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
