EDIFICIO ESPAÑA
It ends the Gran Vía and combines a pyramidal structure with a Baroque-inspired façade. Built between 1948 and 1953 by the brothers Julian and José María Otamendi Machimbarrena, the building bears witness to the Francoist trend of alternating brick and limestone. In the 1950s, it was the highest building in Spain. For a long time it was known as the "swearing building" because of the astonishing swearwords that spontaneously came out of the mouths of onlookers who contemplated it. It is 117 metres high. The 28 floors and the rooftop pool were served by 32 elevators. Until 2005, the ground floor housed a luxury hotel. Since then, it has been bought by the Santander Group for its rehabilitation. After changing hands several times since then, it was the Riu Plaza Group that acquired it in 2017 and opened in August 2019, after more than twenty months of work, the Riu Plaza España Hotel. With 27 floors, 550 rooms, an outdoor pool and a Sky Bar, among other things, this is one of the new flagships of the Madrid hotel industry well installed in an emblematic building of the capital.
Opposite is the Torre de Madrid building, a 130 m high tower. It was built by the same architects as the Edificio España. Originally, it was the highest concrete building in the world.
In the centre of the square , don't miss the monument to Cervantes with Don Quixote and the hilarious Sancho Panza, both on their respective mounts, at the feet of their creator.
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