Madrid's grand avenue near Puerta del Sol

A dangerous street became an insurance palace, then a bank

You're on Calle de Alcalá, steps from the Casino de Madrid, a social club founded in 1836. It still stands about 150 feet away, declared a protected monument in 1993.

A quarter mile along the same street, a nightclub called Alcalá 20 caught fire in the early hours of December 17, 1983. Eighty-two people died, trapped behind a locked exit and an iron grill blocking another way out. It was one of Spain's deadliest nightclub fires.

Alfonso XII of Spain died in 1885 at the Royal Palace of Madrid.

A few doors down Calle de Sevilla, at what was then number 3, the Spanish playwright Ramón de la Cruz died in 1794 inside a palace that stood there, home of the Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente. A metal plaque on the building marks the spot today.

Just past the Casino, at the corner where Calle de Alcalá meets Calle de Sevilla, the architect José Grases Riera put up a new building for an American insurance company. It was called Palacio de la Equitativa, named for the firm that paid for it, La Equitativa, a branch of a New York insurer. The site had just been carved out of the old city. Madrid's city government had spent nearly twenty years, from 1867 to 1885, widening a cramped lane once called Calle de los Peligros into the broad Calle de Sevilla you're standing beside now. That old name meant Street of Dangers. Before the widening, this stretch and its narrow side lanes had a rough reputation, part of a district Madrid called its dangerous quarter. The city auctioned off the cleared building lots in 1885, and only large companies could afford them. The corner lot, sharp-angled where Alcalá meets Sevilla, drew interest from a French investment group represented by a baron before La Equitativa bought it outright in 1886 and gave Grases Riera the commission.

La Equitativa's headquarters changed hands and became something else: the home of a major Spanish bank, Banco Español de Crédito, known as Banesto. For 84 years, Banesto ran its business from behind that carved stone corner. Banco Santander bought Banesto and moved its headquarters elsewhere in 2004. The building you're standing beside went dark and sat empty for years afterward.

Alfonso XIII died in 1941 at the Royal Palace of Madrid.

Inside that same stretch, the Casino de Madrid you can see from here kept growing. Architects Fernando Cánovas del Castillo and Javier Barroso worked on it in 1954, adding to a clubhouse that had already outgrown its founding rooms a century earlier.

In Madrid in 1982, Francisco Javier Angulo Fernández was murdered.

In Madrid in 1984, Tomás Palacín Pellejero was murdered.

In Madrid in 1984, Agustín Pascual Jove was murdered.

In Madrid in 1997, Jesús Agustín Cuesta Abril was murdered.

In Madrid in 1997, Rafael Martínez Emperador was murdered.

In Madrid in 2000, José Francisco de Querol Lombardero was murdered.

In Madrid in 2000, Armando Medina Sánchez was murdered.

In Madrid in 2000, Jesús Escudero García was murdered.

In Madrid in 2000, Jesús Sánchez Martínez was murdered.

In Madrid in 2001, Luis Ortiz de la Rosa was murdered.

A plaque near here, about 400 feet away, commemorates the composer Conrado del Campo, placed in 1954.

Up the street, inside the Alcalá 20 nightclub, the fire already named in this story killed 82 people in the early hours of December 17, 1983. The club's charred basement stayed sealed for twenty years before anyone touched it again. A remodeled club called Adraba opened there in 2005 with new fire safety systems. City authorities shut it down after three hours. It reopened in November 2007 and was shut down again within hours. A club under a new name finally reopened in February 2010, after installers added modern fire detection and sprinkler systems throughout.

In 2012, Spain's government named the old Banesto building a protected cultural landmark, along with five neighboring buildings on the block, including the former Banco Hispano Americano headquarters nearby. That same year, Santander sold the empty building to a construction company, OHL. Workers spent from 2013 to 2019 stripping it back toward its original stonework. Grases Riera's facade, kept intact up to its top balustrade, could not legally be touched. Everything behind it could be rebuilt, and much of it was: the steel floor framing stayed, but the vertical structure was mostly replaced.

The project joined six buildings together into a single complex called Centro Canalejas, with shops, offices, and homes under one roof. The old insurance palace became the heart of it. In September 2020, it reopened as the Four Seasons Hotel Madrid, with 200 rooms and suites running up to 12,000 euros a night. Above the hotel floors, the building now holds 22 private residences, each selling for at least 2.4 million euros.

Not far from the hotel's corner, the restaurant Lhardy has served customers since 1839, when Emilio Huguenin Lhardy opened it to bring French-style dining to Madrid. It's one of the oldest restaurants still running in the city, with a deli counter on the ground floor and a formal dining room above it, much as it was when it opened.

Today you can walk into the Four Seasons lobby where bank tellers once worked, or sit under murals down the block at the old Banco de Bilbao building, painted by Aurelio Arteta in 1922. The Casino de Madrid keeps its doors mostly closed to outsiders, a private club since 1836. On this one stretch of Calle de Alcalá and its cross street, a bank, a nightclub, a centuries-old restaurant, and a playwright's death all left their mark within a few hundred feet of each other.

An alcázar stood three quarters of a mile away

Royal Alcázar of Madrid was built in 900, about three quarters of a mile from this point. Church of Saint Jerome the Royal was built in 1464, about half a mile from this point. Convent of Las Descalzas Reales was built in 1559, about a quarter mile from this point.