Casa de las Siete Chimeneas

OVERVIEW

The House of the Seven Chimneys was built in the sixteenth century and stands on the Plaza del Rey in Madrid. In the seventeenth century it was an ambassadorial residence, home to Sir Richard Fanshawe and his family. It is protected as a Bien de Interés Cultural and is in government use.

HISTORY

The legend, carried since the sixteenth century, concerns a young woman — in the usual telling Elena, married to a soldier who died in Flanders, and said to have been close to Philip II — who was found dead in the house, and whose body then disappeared. Neighbours and servants reported seeing a woman in white moving among the chimneys on the roof, a torch in one hand, the other pointing towards the Alcázar where the king lived.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

What lifts this above the ordinary city legend is what the builders found. At the end of the nineteenth century, during works to extend the building for the Banco de Castilla, a woman's skeleton was uncovered in the basement together with a handful of gold coins minted in the sixteenth century, in the reign of Philip II. The find is on the record and the coins date it. What it proves is another matter, and the entry does not overstate it: a body under a floor, of the right period, in a house that had been saying there was one for three hundred years.

VISITING

A working government building, not generally open to visitors; it can be seen from the Plaza del Rey.