A bank-and-palace corner in central Madrid

A palace, a bank and a hotel share one corner

You're standing on Calle Sevilla, right where it meets the Calle de Alcalá, in Madrid's Sol district. The ground around you is a row of banks built to look like palaces.

Twenty-one feet from you stands the old Banco Español de Crédito building, put up in 1887 and later run as a hotel. A short walk away, at 56 meters, the Banco de Bilbao building went up between 1920 and 1923, its rotunda painted with murals by Aurelio Arteta. The Casino de Madrid, a private club founded in 1836, built its clubhouse 63 meters off in 1910.

Before any of these banks stood here, a palace occupied this same stretch of Calle de Sevilla, at what was number 3. It belonged to the Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente. In 1794, the playwright Ramón de la Cruz died there. A metal plaque on the street today marks the spot where his life ended, inside a palace long since replaced by the buildings you see now.

The bank building beside you began as something else. The architect José Grases Riera designed it between 1887 and 1891 for La Equitativa, a Spanish branch of an American life insurance company. People called it the Palacio de la Equitativa. It went up on a trapezoid-shaped lot, where Calle de Alcalá meets Calle de Sevilla, right after the city widened these streets in the 1880s. Before that, this corner carried a different name.

The street under your feet used to be called Calle de los Panaderos, "Bakers' Street," then later Calle Ancha de los Peligros, "Wide Street of Dangers." Along with the narrow lanes nearby, it had a rough reputation. The city's rebuilding project between 1867 and 1885 widened it to 22 meters and gave it its current name, Calle de Sevilla.

In 1920, the bank Banesto took over the old Equitativa building and made it their headquarters. Spanish architects Joaquín Saldaña y López and later Fernando Cánovas del Castillo and Javier Barroso reworked parts of the building in the decades that followed, adding woodwork and ironwork around 1954 while leaving Grases Riera's original facade standing.

About 400 feet from here, early on the morning of December 17, 1983, fire broke out at the Alcalá 20 nightclub fire. Six hundred people were packed inside, and eighty-two of them died. An exit on an upper floor had been locked, and a passage to a neighboring building was sealed off with an iron grate. The basement club stayed closed and gutted for twenty years before anyone reopened it.

Banco Santander bought Banesto and moved its headquarters elsewhere in 2004. The old palace on this corner stood empty after that, its rooms and stairwells unused for years.

In 2012, the city declared the building a bien de interés cultural, a protected cultural heritage site, along with five neighboring buildings including the old Banco Hispano Americano building nearby. Santander sold the empty palace that same year to the construction company OHL, which planned to turn it into a luxury hotel.

Renovation work started in late 2013 and ran for six years. The building's protected status made the work slow and difficult, since the facade and several interior features could not be touched. Workers and planners folded the old palace into a larger project called Centro Canalejas, which joined it to six other buildings nearby to create a hotel and a shopping mall together, costing around 530 million euros in total.

The hotel opened in September 2020 as the Four Seasons Hotel Madrid, the first Four Seasons in Spain. It has 200 rooms, including 39 suites, two restaurants, a spa, and a rooftop terrace. A suite here can run up to 12,000 euros a night. The top floors hold private residences that sell for at least 2.4 million euros each.

Madrid's criminal history since the late twentieth century includes a long list of political killings carried out across the city, recorded simply as "Madrid" rather than tied to any single street. Among them: Florentino López del Castillo, murdered in 1995; Jesús Agustín Cuesta Abril and Rafael Martínez Emperador, both murdered in 1997; José Francisco de Querol Lombardero, Armando Medina Sánchez, Jesús Escudero García, and Jesús Sánchez Martínez, all murdered in Madrid in 2000; Luis Ortiz de la Rosa, murdered in 2001; and three more in the early 1980s, Francisco Javier Angulo Fernández in 1982, Antonio Conejo Salgueiro in 1983, and Tomás Palacín Pellejero and Agustín Pascual Jove, both in 1984. None of these killings is tied to this particular corner, but they belong to the city whose streets you are walking.

In the Royal Palace of Madrid, Ferdinand VII of Spain died in 1833, ending a reign marked by repression and reversal of Spain's liberal constitution.

Today, stepping out from the hotel's entrance, you stand at a crossing built by nineteenth-century money and rebuilt by twenty-first-century money. The Casino de Madrid's clubhouse still runs as a private club up the block. Two restaurants with a long history sit close by: Lhardy, opened in 1839, serves its old-fashioned Madrid cuisine about 400 feet away.