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Pestana Collection Plaza Mayor
Madrid, Spain · Pestana · Accessible Luxury
Plaza Mayor 3 was the Casa de la Carnicería, the depot that supplied meat to every market and butcher in Madrid, and it went on serving the city long afterwards as the deputy mayor's house, a fire station and the district council offices. In 2019 it became the first hotel in the four-hundred-year history of the square: 89 rooms behind herreriano walls built to copy the Casa de la Panadería opposite, almost half of them looking onto the plaza, a heated pool below ground and a seasonal one on the roof.
- 89 rooms
- Opened 2019
- Neighborhood: Barrio de los Austrias
About Pestana Collection Plaza Mayor
- Madrid put its own building out to tender and signed a forty-year concession to run it as a hotel on 21 May 2015, five days before the city elected a new mayor. The doors opened four years later, after 11.6 million euros of work.
- After the last of the Plaza Mayor fires in 1790, Juan de Villanueva rebuilt the whole square as the closed, symmetrical space it is today, and the Casa de la Carnicería went up again between 1808 and 1842.
- The building is a listed Bien de Interés Cultural. A 2007 plan to turn it into a state parador was refused outright, and city planning rules did not permit a hotel here until 2009.
- Firefighters lived in it: a fire service delegation moved into the Calle Imperial side in 1955, and dormitories for the crews were built in the courtyard in 1980.
- It opened with a steakhouse called RIB Casa de la Carnicería, Beef & Wine, which took the building's old trade back. The ground-floor room is now the Café de la Plaza, with a terrace on the square.
History
The hotel fills two joined buildings on the south side of the Plaza Mayor: the Casa de la Carnicería at number 3, which also gives onto Calle Imperial 8, and a former fire station beside it. The Casa de la Carnicería was the city's general meat depot, the warehouse from which meat went out to Madrid's markets and shops, which is where the name comes from. Nobody knows exactly when the present building went up. It is thought to have been rebuilt after one of the early Plaza Mayor fires, and it was rebuilt again between 1808 and 1842, in the wake of the 1790 fire after which Juan de Villanueva remade the square as the closed, symmetrical space visitors see now. Either way it follows the herreriano manner of the Casa de la Panadería directly opposite: four storeys over a ground-floor arcade, with towers at the corners.
The building kept working for the city for another century. In the late nineteenth century it housed the deputy mayor and the district emergency post; from the early twentieth it held municipal offices as a Casa Consistorial; in 1955 a fire service delegation took the Calle Imperial side, with dormitories added in the courtyard in 1980; and from 1985 to 2008 it was the seat of the Junta Municipal de Centro. It is listed as a Bien de Interés Cultural and is publicly owned.
The hotel took a long time to arrive. Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón tried to turn the building into a state parador in 2007 and was refused by the central government; a 2009 amendment to the city plan finally allowed hotel use; the tender went out in March 2015, and on 21 May 2015 the city signed a forty-year concession with Global Mandalay, a Pestana Hotel Group company. The works licence followed in 2017 and Pestana Plaza Mayor Madrid opened on 13 May 2019 after 11.6 million euros of investment, the group's second hotel in Spain. There are 89 rooms and suites, ten of them suites, across more than 6,600 square metres, with almost half the rooms facing the Plaza Mayor, a spa and heated pool on the lower level, a gym, and a rooftop bar with a seasonal pool.
The setting
The Plaza Mayor is the ceremonial heart of Habsburg Madrid, the closed square Juan de Villanueva finished after the 1790 fire, and the hotel is built into its south side. This is the Barrio de los Austrias, the oldest part of the city: the Mercado de San Miguel is a minute away, Plaza de la Villa and the Royal Palace are a short walk west, the Puerta del Sol sits just east, and Cava Baja and the Latina tapas streets run downhill to the south. Sol metro and the Cercanías station are both within a few hundred metres.
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