Another route with made-up ghosts in sheets and carnival-style scares? This sightseeing tour is the opposite. For two hours, you'll visit nine sites in Madrid's historic centre where real crimes, documented murders, dismemberments, political attacks, and paranormal cases with signed police files took place.
We start at Plaza de Oriente, in front of the Royal Palace. I'll tell you the storey of Charles II “the Bewitched”, the last Habsburg, who was exorcised in the Alcázar before dying with a body “without a drop of blood” according to the coroner who signed his autopsy. Then we walk to the side of the palace to look down on the Royal Theatre — built in the shape of a coffin on an old Muslim cemetery: the Tower of Bones.
We go down Calle Sacramento to the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, thirty metres from the balcony from which Mateo Morral threw the bomb that killed 25 people on the day of Alfonso XIII's wedding in 1906. Then we enter Plaza del Conde de Miranda, where in 1913 an army captain and his 18-year-old daughter dismembered a wealthy widower and walled him up in his own kitchen.
We enter Plaza Mayor via Calle de la Amargura — the last street that those sentenced to death walked along. There, I'll tell you about the public execution of Don Rodrigo Calderón, Marquis of Siete Iglesias, and the legend of the ghost of Cirilo, who still walks under the arcades.
We continue to Plaza de la Provincia, where the Madrid Court Prison was located, to talk about Luis Candelas, the most famous bandit in the city, who was executed in 1837 at the doors of the building itself.
From there, we'll go to the Posada del Peine — the oldest hotel in Spain, founded in 1610 — where for four centuries no one asked the names of the guests, where there are rooms with secret staircases behind the closet, and where a lady in black still appears, as seen by a maid and a guest at the current hotel.
We'll then head through the Pasadizo de San Ginés to one of the oldest churches in Madrid, where in 1353 some thieves beheaded an old man and left his head at the feet of the Virgin. His ghost is still there.
We finish in Plaza de Ópera with stories of bloody Madrid that are too far away to visit: the walled-up skeletons of the Casa de las Siete Chimeneas, the real psychophony recorded at the Palacio de Linares in 1990 — which you'll hear live on your phone — and the Vallecas File, the only official paranormal police case documented in Spain.
I'm not telling you made-up legends. I'm telling you about files, dates, names, and addresses that you can check later in the newspaper archive. This is the most unique night you'll ever spend in Madrid.
