The bronze figure in the middle of this little square shows a foundling who was left with the nuns of a Madrid orphanage in December 1868, and who thirty years later, serving as a soldier in Cuba, volunteered for a task nobody else would take.
His name was Eloy Gonzalo, and near the village of Cascorro his unit was pinned down facing an enemy position that had to be set on fire at close range. He stepped forward, took a rifle, a can of petroleum and some matches, and asked them to tie a rope around his waist so they could pull him back, alive or dead. He succeeded, but he did not live much longer, dying in a military hospital in June 1897.
In 1902 sculpted him holding exactly those three things, and he has stood here at the start of ever since. The fact that Madrid chose a foundling of all people as its hero, and placed him in the neighbourhood where the poorest people lived, says a lot about how this part of town thinks of itself.
Calle de Embajadores begins here at the square, and to our left a heavy church facade soon rises into view.
Sources. Story: Wikipedia, Monument to Eloy Gonzalo; Ministerio de Defensa, Revista Española de Defensa, Eloy Gonzalo, héroe de Cascorro, 2018; Juan Pando Despierto, Cascorro, hombre y estatua, Anales del Museo de América, 1998. Photos: Photo of the monument to Eloy Gonzalo: Tamorlan, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
