Just over forty kilometres from Madrid is where you'll find the main square of Chinchón, and surrounding it, there is one of those villages that is a must-see. Perhaps you think we exaggerate by giving so much importance to its main square but this is because the history of this beautiful town passes through it.
read more
Just over forty kilometres from Madrid is where you'll find the main square of Chinchón, and surrounding it, there is one of those villages that is a must-see. Perhaps you think we exaggerate by giving so much importance to its main square but this is because the history of this beautiful town passes through it.
The symbolic space began to form in the last years of the fifteenth century. Not long before that, Chinchón had moved entirely to a higher site than the one it had occupied before, due to a tiresome mosquito infestation. Look how things are, before the invention of insecticides, these bugs were capable of annoying so much as to move a whole village. The fact is that there were a lot of cattle here and a lot of farmers and the latter preferred to watch their flocks from the balcony of their house, without having to go out, so this peculiar custom gave the square a particular shape. The town hall itself is an old cattlemen's house bought to accommodate the discussions of their lordships.
Chinchón's main square, with its arcades, galleries and wooden balconies, was not wholly enclosed until the seventeenth century. In its long history, it has been used for everything: it has been the scene of royal executions and celebrations, a comedy barnyard and a bullring, and it has also been featured in cinema classics such as Around the World in Eighty Days. In the 1990s a voting process was organised to recover the blue colour which, it seems, had been the colour of the square for centuries, but in the end green was the tone preferred by the locals. And perhaps that was one of the reasons why in 2008 it was declared the 4th wonder of the Community of Madrid.
Although not everything in Chinchón is its beautiful main square, of course. As befits a noble and ancient town, there is a 16th-century fortress built by the Count of Chinchón. The previous one had been destroyed by the villagers around 1520, and this present one is not called the Castle of the Counts by chance: the county officials occupied it for two hundred years until it was severely damaged by some military disturbances.
In addition to Baroque houses and convents such as San Agustín or the Clarisas, it is said that "Chinchón has a tower without a church and a church without a tower". The first is the Clock Tower, which belonged to a temple that was destroyed by the Napoleonic troops. And the second, the Church of the Assumption, finished in 1626 after a long break devoted to discussing how the counts, who provided the cash, wanted to be buried inside and that their coat of arms should be on the main façade, in plain sight. And it took almost fifty years for the parties to agree on this!
