Casa de la Panadería

Casa de la Panadería (Bakery House) today houses the tourist information point of the Madrid City Hall. It is also used as a venue for exhibitions.

Commissioned by Philip III, the architect Juan Gómez de Mora carried out between 1617 and 1619, a profound transformation of the old plaza del Arrabal, turning it into what is now the Plaza Mayor and giving it its main features: a rectangular square, homogeneous at the height of the village and ideal courtly representation space.

In the centre of the north side, Gomez de Mora joined the building with the Casa de la Panadería (Bakery House), modifying only the ground floor, although the height was lower than the rest of the hamlet that formed the plaza.

As the building was a symmetrical composition of four floors and arcade ground floor, with penthouse top floor and the sides crowned by angular towers. The fire of August 1672, the second to be produced in the square, completely destroyed la Casa de la Panadería, so the architect Tomás Román undertook the project of reconstruction and the painters Claudio Coello and José Jiménez Donoso completed the interior decoration and frescoes on the façade.

Another fire in the summer of 1790 swept three-quarters of the square, but la Casa de la Panadería was able to be saved, with its height and architectural features which became standard throughout the plaza in the reconstruction the following year undertaken by Juan de Villanueva.