Why do the New Year chimes ring in Puerta del Sol?

Who told the time in Puerta del Sol before the clock?

A bell. Until the mid-1800s, one side of the square was taken up by the church of the Buen Suceso. It had grown out of a hospital founded during the plague of 1438, which Charles V turned into the Royal Hospital of the Court. Its bell tower set the rhythm of Sol.

Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, the great chronicler of old Madrid, captured the scene in 1861. He remembered the idle young men of earlier days who gathered there to swap stories of their love affairs, sit in the sun, take a pinch of snuff and smoke a cigar while they waited for the bell's last call to the two o'clock Mass. Until the demolition, it was that bell tower that marked the hours in the square.

Why was a clock put on the Real Casa de Correos?

Because Sol was left without the time. The great mid-nineteenth-century redevelopment that widened the square swept away houses, the hospital and the church, bell tower and all. The Comunidad de Madrid puts it simply: thanks to the new clock, after the Buen Suceso came down, people in Madrid could tell the time again. A press release from the Comunidad adds that the new clock replaced an older one, running since the eighteenth century, which had a poor reputation in Madrid for constantly going wrong.

The building itself was nearly a hundred years old by then. The Real Casa de Correos was built between 1760 and 1768 for Charles III by the French architect Jaime Marquet. The small tower and the little temple-like structure on top were added in 1855. The clock followed eleven years later.

Who made the Puerta del Sol clock?

A clockmaker from León who'd settled in London, José Rodríguez Losada, and he gave it as a gift. According to the Comunidad de Madrid, it took three years to get it going, with entirely handmade machinery. Queen Isabella II inaugurated it on 19 November 1866, and the bell carries her dedication.

The mechanism is steel and brass, and the clock has four faces pointing to the four points of the compass and a three-metre pendulum that takes two seconds for each swing. From up there it's seen a great deal. The Comunidad mentions the proclamation of the Republic, the Civil War and the bombing raids, and says that during one of them, so the story goes, a shell came in through the face overlooking Calle de Carretas and never went off.

Why Puerta del Sol and not another square?

Because Sol became the centre of Madrid, and it hadn't always been. In 1720, land in Sol was valued far below land in the Plaza Mayor: twelve reales a foot against eighty or more. But in the nineteenth century, everything started happening there. As a boy, Mesonero watched Wellington ride in to cheering crowds in 1812 and, two days later, saw the Constitution of Cádiz read out from a wooden stage. In 1830, Sol was where Madrid first tried out gas street lighting. And from 1847 the Casa de Correos was the Ministry of the Interior, the Gobernación: power, with a balcony over the busiest square in town. Once the square had been widened, a foot of land there could fetch five hundred reales.

The Royal Academy of History gives the proclamation of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931, when the building was still the Ministry, as an example of how central it was. In 1950, the plaque marking Kilometre Zero, the point from which Spain's main roads are measured, was set in the ground in front of it. And the Academy is quite plain about it: since 1866, that clock has given both the official time and the twelve strokes of Spain's New Year ritual.

How long have Spaniards been eating twelve grapes at midnight?

The explanation you'll hear most often puts the start in 1909: that year, the story goes, grape growers in eastern Spain had a surplus and handed the fruit out, promising it would bring good luck on New Year's Eve. Madrid City Council's tourism website has described it as the most widely held.

But the Madrid papers were already talking about grapes fifteen years earlier. On 1 January 1894, El Imparcial ran a piece called "Uvas bienhechoras", roughly "Grapes That Do You Good", which El Siglo Futuro reprinted the next day. It explained that until a few years before, very few people had eaten grapes as the first stroke of midnight sounded, and that the habit had since caught on. It described it as a custom imported from France and credited it, half in jest, with bringing happiness for the whole of the coming year.

There's another version you'll come across a lot: that it all began when a group of Madrid locals, annoyed by a council ban on street festivities, turned up in Sol to eat grapes to the chimes. It's widely repeated, but we haven't found a single contemporary document that supports it.

And notice one detail: the passage of the 1894 article that has been published talks about eating grapes on the first stroke of midnight, but not where. When people first started going to Puerta del Sol to eat them beneath the clock is something we haven't been able to document.

When did the Sol chimes first appear on television?

According to the Comunidad de Madrid, the clock's fame became truly nationwide from New Year's Eve 1962, the first time the chimes from Puerta del Sol were broadcast on television. Since then the party in the square has reached the whole country on radio and television, and the Comunidad describes it as the clock with which most Spaniards welcome the New Year. A gift from a clockmaker from León, put up to fill the gap left by a bell tower.

Fact or legend.

Fact: the clock was installed in 1866 on the tower of the Real Casa de Correos, added in 1855; it was donated by the clockmaker José Rodríguez Losada and inaugurated by Isabella II.

Fact: it filled the gap left by the bell tower of the Buen Suceso, demolished when the square was widened in the mid-nineteenth century.

Fact: the grapes already appear in the Madrid press in January 1894, before the supposed surplus of 1909.

No document we've read: that the grapes began as a protest in Sol, or when people first started gathering in the square to eat them.

So the story goes: a shell came in through one of the clock faces during the war and didn't explode.

According to the Comunidad de Madrid: New Year's Eve 1962 was the first with the Sol chimes on television.

Where to hear it

The story of the clock is told right in front of it, at the stop "The clock that gave Madrid the right time" on From Puerta del Sol to Plaza Mayor, Podtour's free route in Madrid: eleven stops over just over a kilometre. How a second-rate square ended up as the centre, and the Kilometre Zero plaque, come in "The square that wasn't the centre". And once you reach Plaza Mayor, the equestrian statue has a legend of its own: Philip III's statue and the legend of the birds.

If you're planning your trip, the Madrid guide has the practical side covered.

Why do Spain's New Year chimes ring out from Puerta del Sol?

Who told the time in Puerta del Sol before the clock?

Why was a clock put on the Real Casa de Correos?

Who made the Puerta del Sol clock?

Why Puerta del Sol and not another square?

How long have Spaniards been eating twelve grapes at midnight?

When did the Sol chimes first appear on television?

Where to hear it

Further reading

Where to hear this story

From Puerta del Sol to Plaza Mayor

Plan your time in Madrid

Your first city,
on Podtour.

Your first city,
on Podtour.

Who told the time in Puerta del Sol before the clock?

Why was a clock put on the Real Casa de Correos?

Who made the Puerta del Sol clock?

Why Puerta del Sol and not another square?

How long have Spaniards been eating twelve grapes at midnight?

When did the Sol chimes first appear on television?

Where to hear it

Further reading

Where to hear this story

From Puerta del Sol to Plaza Mayor

Plan your time in Madrid

Your first city,on Podtour.

Your first city,on Podtour.

Your first city,
on Podtour.

Your first city,
on Podtour.