Taberna Antonio Sánchez, Madrid

The claim

A Lavapiés taberna that has never been refitted: a tin counter, gas lamps left in place, tiles, carved woodwork, bulls' heads on the walls and a till more than a century old. Madrid's tourism service dates it before February 1787, when a newspaper advertised the premises for transfer as a wine business. Bullfighters and writers made it theirs, and the kitchen still cooks oxtail, tripe and cocido.

What the records show

The year comes from research rather than from the house: the historian Antonio Pasies dated the tavern to 1787 in a book published in 2018, and the City of Madrid's tourism service sets out how. It says the exact founding date is not known but that the house is older than February 1787, when the Diario Curioso, Erudito, Económico y Comercial announced that the premises were being transferred as a wine business, and that the cadastral survey of Madrid made in 1749 shows the same building on the plot with the tavern's space unchanged. We have not read the notice itself, and what it records is a wine trade rather than the word taberna, so the grade rests on a dated publication about this address in the claimed year and not on a licence. Other dates circulate: an association of Madrid's old restaurants gives 1830 and a first name of Taberna de Álvaro de la Virgen, which would make the house forty-three years younger. The name it carries now arrived in 1884 with a new owner called Antonio Sánchez; accounts differ on whether he was a wine merchant from Valdepeñas or the father of the bullfighter of the same name who went behind the bar after an injury. Whether a drink can be had without a meal is not stated in words by anything traced. What is recorded is the fitting: the tin counter survives in use, wine is on the list, and the city's tourism service, Guía Repsol and the Madrid press all call the house a taberna rather than a restaurant. The city's own register was read on 18 September 2026 and it names this house. Madrid's catalogue of protected elements, published with the 1997 revision of the General Plan, carries the building as entry 04850 in the Calle del Mesón de Paredes at the level the plan calls Parcial, with conditions in a record of its own, and carries the premises separately, as entry 04850-01 in its list of protected commercial establishments, printed as Taberna Antonio Sanchez at number 13 and at Nivel 1 — the door number in the catalogue is the door number over the street. The catalogue gives no dates at all, so it neither supports the 1787 nor argues against it and the grade is unchanged; what it settles is that the fitting this note describes is protected as well as the fabric round it. The control is that the same list carries the neighbours by number in this street — a haberdasher at 6, a perfumer at 7, a chemist at 8, an electrical shop at 20, a shoemaker at 33 — so an establishment of this kind here would have been found. What is still out of reach is the notice itself: the National Library's newspaper library, which holds the Diario Curioso, Erudito, Económico y Comercial of February 1787, answers a security challenge rather than a page, and the Complutense University's digitisation of the same paper is served through a route that has been closed to this project, so nobody here has yet read the four lines the whole date rests on.

Dated evidence for Taberna Antonio Sánchez, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1787	Claimed founding	Local history
1787	First record of a drinking house here	Wikipedia

What to look for inside

Dated before February 1787 by a notice in the Diario Curioso
Shown on the 1749 cadastral survey of Madrid in the same footprint
Named in 1884 after a new owner; Díaz-Cañabate wrote a book about the house

Visiting

Taberna Antonio Sánchez is in Madrid, Spain, at Calle del Mesón de Paredes 13, 28012 Madrid. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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