Palacios, Puertas y Plazas: The Construction of Urban Spaces in the Popular Press (1833-1868)s

The Puerta del Sol, easily the most famous and recognizable public space in all of Madrid, served as a central setting for many early 19^th-century works, particularly those produced for a mass audience via the popular press. It came to embody many concepts in popular literature, from local identity to national uprising. In his 1845 novel María o la hija de un jornalero, Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco titles one of his chapters “La Puerta del Sol” and describes the space frequently:

Nada hay seguramente en Madrid tan famoso como la Puerta del Sol. La celebridad de esta plaza se ha hecho europea, y sin embargo es de las más irregulares de Madrid; pero como está situada en su centro y desembocan en ella las calles principales…es tan numerosa la concurrencia, que las más de las veces se transita por ella con dificultad (146).

As the central public space of Madrid, the Puerta del Sol is the setting for many of the scenes in Ayguals’s novels, in which his characters encounter beggars, blind men singing local songs, friends, acquaintances, lovers, and political activists and revolutionaries. In Los pobres de Madrid, he describes it as “el sitio más célebre que encierra Madrid…el arco principal por donde se entra en la capital de España” (334). His contemporary, Antonio Flores, was somewhat less kind to the famous plaza. He generally portrayed it as a hub of laziness, vice, and gossip, as we see in “La Puerta del Sol en 1800” from Ayer, hoy y mañana: “Si en vez de llamarse Puerta del Sol, se dejara llamar Plaza de la Ociosidad, nadie extrañaría que fuese el verdadero pórtico de todos los vicios” (III 41-42).

One single place, represented in the newspaper articles and serial novels of Isabeline Madrid (1833-1868), came to embody a great variety of meanings and emotions, largely due to the spatial transformations and political chaos of the era. If a place such as the Puerta del Sol can be the site of both festivals and riots, both leisurely strolls and violent attacks, then this plurality of meanings around the space is explicable. However, authors like Ayguals and Flores were not simply reflecting and reacting to the chaos and transformations taking place in Madrid; they were participating in a reciprocal conversation with their readers, and that conversation allowed them to absorb the cultural significance of the public and private spaces within the city while simultaneously imbuing them with meaning, significance, language, history, and agency.

This article seeks to show that Ayguals and Flores acted as a transformative force on 19^th-century Madrid by creating characters that purposefully navigate their spaces and participate in their assigned environments. The authors’ narration relies heavily on spatial description, which constantly defines the meaning and emotional significance of urban spaces. Ayguals and Flores had the ability to symbolically (and, at times, concretely) alter the spaces of the city through the dissemination of newspapers, for which they served as writers, editors, and directors. They were among the primary forces assigning meaning to the urban spaces of Madrid, and they did so in a way that made those spaces legible for the city’s inhabitants.

Spatial Transformations

The first great transformation of space in 19^th-century Madrid came about due to the process of desamortización, the destruction and/or public sale of Church property such as convents, churches, and monasteries. The two chief phases of desamortización came about in 1836 under Juan Álvarez Mendizábal and in 1855 under Pascual Madoz, the minister of finance who later became governor of Madrid. Under Mendizábal. 62% of the Church’s land was sold with the intention of transferring the property to living people, rather than just having the land pass from generation to generation.¹ Some of this land was turned into public space, such as parks or pleasure gardens, or public buildings like hospitals and museums; the transformation of land in the 1840s was partially...