Plaza Mayor, Salamanca: free audio guide, medallions and tips

Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor is the city’s main square: a Baroque square of golden stone built between 1729 and 1755, ringed by 88 arches and open to everyone, day and night, for free. No 2 of its sides are the same length, and between the arches runs a gallery of carved portraits of kings, soldiers and writers. This free audio guide lasts about 4 minutes and takes you round all 4 sides.

What the Plaza Mayor audio guide covers

Press play standing in the middle of the square, then walk round it clockwise: City Hall first, then the east, south and west sides. Each part tells you where to look and where to walk next. There are 7 parts:

Plaza Mayor opening hours, entry and the tourist office

The Plaza Mayor is a pedestrian public square, so there’s no ticket and no gate: it’s open 24 hours a day, every day, and entry is free. Allow 20 to 30 minutes to walk all 4 sides at an easy pace with your head tilted up at the medallions (longer with a coffee).

The city’s tourist office is inside the square itself, at Plaza Mayor 32. As of 20 October 2026, it opens:

• Monday to Friday: 9am to 7pm.
• Saturday: 10am to 7pm.
• Sunday: 10am to 2pm.

The phone number is 923 21 83 42. The office has material adapted for visitors with disabilities, and it’s also the starting point of the city’s daily guided walks. You buy your place from the guide at the meeting point, 5 minutes before the start; the price depends on the walk, and entry to any monuments on the route is paid on top.

How to read the medallions

Look up at the curved space between any 2 arches. In each sits a stone roundel, a medallion with the bust of a figure from Spanish history. There are 88 arches, so 88 spaces, and the idea behind them came from the man who pushed for the square in the first place, the city magistrate Rodrigo Caballero y Llanes. His plan sorted them by theme: monarchs on the Royal Pavilion, soldiers on San Martín, scholars on Petrineros and saints on the City Hall side.

Things didn’t quite go to plan. The sculptor Alejandro Carnicero carved the first medallions between 1730 and 1733, but building stalled from 1735 to 1750 and only about half of the original plan was carved. From the second half of the 20th century, and especially from 1967, the City Council commissioned new ones from artists with links to Salamanca. That’s why the square reads like a timeline: walk round it and you get a version of Spanish history in stone, with the saints once planned for the north side replaced by the 20th and 21st centuries.

The quick key, side by side:

• East: kings and queens, in date order from Alfonso XI to Charles III.
• South: soldiers and conquistadors.
• West: writers, thinkers and figures from the Peninsular War.
• North: the 20th and 21st centuries, many of them added in 2005.

The 4 sides of the Plaza Mayor

At first glance the square looks perfectly regular, but it isn’t. The plan is an irregular four-sided shape, none of its sides the same length, covering about 6,400 m² not counting the arcades. The buildings rise 3 floors, except City Hall, which has 2; City Hall and the Royal Pavilion stand taller than the rest. Count the exits and you’ll find 9 leading out to streets and squares, plus 2 passageways on the west side that were once the way in for carriages.

North: City Hall. The Baroque facade is the work of Andrés García de Quiñones, who drew up a new design for it when work resumed in 1741. The belfry on top came later, in 1852: it holds 3 bells and 4 figures standing for Industry, Agriculture, Music and Poetry, and a clock sits there too. Over the central arch, the 2 medallions are of the square’s founders, Rodrigo Caballero and the architect Alberto de Churriguera. Many of the others were added in 2005, with kings and the First and Second Republics.

East: the Royal Pavilion (Pabellón Real). This was the first stretch to go up, from 1729 to 1733, on land the city already owned. It also works as a retaining wall for the slope, which is why its back, facing the Mercado, is taller. In the middle is the Arch of San Fernando, topped by the arms of Philip V together with the figure of Ferdinand III the Saint, and a slate plaque recording the start of the work. Philip V appears 3 times on this side: once over the central arch, as the king who authorised the square, and once for each of his 2 reigns. 3 of the 5 women on the whole square are here too: Isabella the Catholic, Joanna I of Castile and Elisabeth Farnese.

South: the San Martín Pavilion. Built from 1732 to 1735, it bends slightly out of line to respect the old medieval streets behind it. Its medallions earned it the nickname “General Headquarters”: Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro and the Grand Duke of Alba.

West: the Petrineros side. Built from 1750, this is the culture side: Antonio de Nebrija, Fray Luis de León, Miguel de Cervantes, Teresa de Jesús, Francisco de Vitoria and Miguel de Unamuno. If you’re British, look out for Wellington, next to the local guerrilla fighter Julián Sánchez, known as “El Charro”. The first medallion here was of Manuel Godoy, removed when the Peninsular War began. Right in the centre is the newest, Alfonso IX of León, by the sculptor Óscar César Alvariño, unveiled on 4 August 2023 for the University’s 800th anniversary.

From market to bullring: Plaza Mayor history

Before there was a square, there was a market. The Mercado de San Martín filled this ground in the Middle Ages, and today’s square covers only about a quarter of it. The push for something grander came from the magistrate Rodrigo Caballero y Llanes, and work began in 1729, under Philip V, with Alberto de Churriguera as architect.

The first 2 pavilions went up fast. Then the owners of the remaining plots dug their heels in, most notably the Count of Grajal, and building stalled for about 15 years. Churriguera left the city. Things were unblocked in 1741, with Andrés García de Quiñones in charge, but real progress came from 1750 with the Petrineros side and City Hall, and the last house was finished in 1755. Take out the stoppages and the whole square took about 10 years of actual building.

Until the 1830s the square was used as a bullring; later it was laid out with gardens, and in 1954 those were cleared and the ground paved with the granite slabs you’re standing on. The bullfighting past still shows once a year: every 25 July a mast with a bull and the Spanish flag, known as la Mariseca, goes up on the City Hall belfry to announce the September festivities of the Virgen de la Vega.

In 1988 UNESCO inscribed the Old City of Salamanca, Plaza Mayor included, on the World Heritage List, and the square is also protected in Spain as a Bien de Interés Cultural.

Where to sit, and tips for a day trip

• Sit on a terrace and watch. The old shops under the arcades are now cafés and restaurants, and taking a table to watch the square go by is close to a local ritual. The classic is Café Novelty, opened in 1905 and the oldest on the square: Unamuno and the novelist Gonzalo Torrente Ballester met there, and a sculpture of Torrente by Fernando Mayoral keeps his memory alive.
• Join the evening stroll. The square was the city’s meeting place: tradition had men walking round clockwise and women the other way. Unamuno called it “the city’s main rumour mill”.
• Come back after dark. At night the facades are lit and the stone turns gold.
• Coming from Madrid for the day? Trains and buses connect the 2 cities every day. From the bus station (Av. Filiberto Villalobos 71) it’s about 1.4 km, an 18-minute walk; from the train station, allow 25 to 30 minutes on foot.
• Check what’s on. The square hosts the Antique Book Fair in autumn, the Book Fair in spring and concerts during the Virgen de la Vega festivities in September. It has also been a film set, for Vantage Point (2008) and Alejandro Amenábar’s While at War (2019).

From the square, the University is a 7-minute walk (about 540 m) and the New Cathedral 9 minutes (about 680 m). Keep going downhill past both and in about 14 minutes you reach the Roman Bridge over the Tormes. For more audio guides around the country, browse our free audio guides to Spain.

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