Chinchón
"Chinchón's square doesn't perform history for you — it just keeps living inside it."
A circular medieval square ringed with wooden balconies still doubles as a bullring twice a year — the rest of the time it just serves garlic soup and anís to anyone who wanders in.
I drove out from Madrid on a Sunday morning, forty-five minutes southeast on the A-4 and then a smaller road that curls through olive groves and the kind of scrubby brown hills that Castile does better than anywhere else I know. You smell Chinchón before you park — anís, sharp and licorice-sweet, drifting from somewhere near the square. It turns out to be coming from everywhere. This is a town built, quite literally, around a distillery.
A Square That Refuses to Be a Museum
The Plaza Mayor is the thing everyone comes for, and it earns it. It’s not rectangular like most Spanish squares — it’s an irregular oval, ringed by three-story houses with wooden galleries stacked one above the other, over two hundred balconies in total, each one slightly different, sagging with the particular tilt of five centuries of settling timber. Locals still hang their laundry and their geraniums from them like nothing unusual is going on. Twice a year, in a tradition that goes back to the 15th century, the square is boarded up and turned into a temporary bullring, and those same balconies become box seats. I sat at a table outside one of the bars along the perimeter with a glass of the local dry anís and just watched the light move across the timber for the better part of an hour. Nobody rushed me. Nobody in Chinchón seems to rush anyone.
The square’s oldest surviving structure predates the Catholic Monarchs, and the whole ensemble was declared a national historic monument decades ago, but what struck me wasn’t the age — it’s that the plaza still functions as the actual civic heart of the town. Old men play dominoes under the arcades. Kids kick a ball against the church steps. It’s a stage set that never stopped being a living room.
Anís, Garlic Soup, and the Castle on the Hill
Chinchón’s anís liqueur has been distilled here since the 19th century, and the town’s fortunes were built on it as much as on saffron and garlic, both of which still get sold in braided strings from shopfronts around the square. I ate at a mesón tucked into one of the arcaded corners — sopa de ajo, garlic soup thickened with stale bread and a poached egg, the kind of dish that tastes like it was invented for exactly this kind of cool, dry morning. It arrived in a blackened clay pot still bubbling.
Above the square, on a low rise, sits the Castillo de los Condes, a 15th-century fortress that later belonged to the Counts of Chinchón — one of whom, legend has it, brought quinine back from Peru and gave the world its name via his wife, the Condesa de Chinchón, though historians now treat that story with some skepticism. The castle itself is closed to the public and used for storage, which felt oddly fitting: even the ruins here don’t perform for tourists, they just keep existing.
Below the castle, the Iglesia de la Asunción holds a small Goya painting — the Assumption of the Virgin, done early in his career when his brother was the parish priest here. It’s easy to miss if you don’t ask, tucked into a side chapel with no fanfare at all, which by that point in the day felt entirely on brand for this town.
When to go: Late April through June brings mild weather and the town’s Semana Santa and spring bullfighting traditions without the peak-summer Madrid crowds; early autumn offers the same calm with harvest-season anís and garlic on full display.