If you take the passageway to the southwest from Plaza de la Villa, you will enter a square known (but not signposted) as Plaza del Rollo. It forms the roof of an underground parking lot, and it now houses a memorial to the Madrileños who died in Mauthausen concentration camp.
As the fall of Barcelona ended the Civil War, nearly 500,000 Republicans fled to France. The French were completely overwhelmed by the influx, and the Spanish endured atrocious conditions, with a very high mortality rate. However, many of them were soon able to find work in an agricultural country whose labour force had been drafted. When the Germans occupied France, they used a lot of Spanish forced labour, particularly in building Atlantic defences. However, 7,000 Spaniards, identified as Rote Spanier (“Red Spaniards”) were sent to Mauthausen, where two-thirds of them died.
The memorial consists of five different pieces, with the names of 449 Madrileños inscribed on three of them. Opened in March 2023, it is the work of architect José Miguel Utande.