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Casa de La Villa. City of Madrid
Those two matching doorways facing Calle Mayor aren't a design coincidence—they tell you this building was built with a split personality. From 1692 until 2007, the left door led to Madrid's municipal prison while the right one admitted city officials. That's 315 years the same Baroque facade kept justice and governance literally side by side. Designed by Juan Gómez de Mora, the architect behind Plaza Mayor, Casa de la Villa rose right here after Madrid's government needed more than the medieval structures that stood on this exact spot before. Look up inside and you'll find Antonio Palomino's ornate frescoes and seventeenth-century tapestries lining rooms where every major city decision was made during Spain's golden age. The Tuscan columns on that Calle Mayor facade? Added a century later by Juan de Villanueva, the same architect who designed the Prado. When the city finally moved operations to the Palacio de Comunicaciones, they left behind one of Europe's longest-serving dual-purpose civic buildings.
Did You Know?
- : The Casa de la Villa served as Madrid's city hall for over 300 years, from 1692 until 2007, making it one of the longest-serving government buildings in Europe. It was the site where many key decisions shaping Madrid's history were debated and enacted, from city ordinances to responses to royal decrees.
- The building's elegant Baroque façade features slate spires and a striking gallery of Tuscan columns added by renowned architect Juan de Villanueva in 1789. This gallery was specially designed so that Spanish kings could watch the Corpus Christi procession from the balcony, blending civic and religious traditions.
- Inside the Casa de la Villa, visitors can find the original statue of the Mariblanca, a mysterious figure whose replica now stands in Puerta del Sol. The building also once housed a municipal prison, and remnants of a 15th-century audience hall were discovered during renovations in 2018, revealing layers of Madrid’s past beneath its floors.