Plaza Santo Domingo

Afew blocks away from Plaza Mayor, I sat on the first floor of an internet café, whose balconies opened out on to the Plaza Domingo. I looked down onto a series of colonnaded crumbling arches. However, the technology on the ground outside occupied a different century from the World Wide Web. In between these arches and in front of the open fronted shops behind them, was a busy community of printers. The rattling of old printing presses and the hammering of stencil tools dominated. A range of personalised stationary was on display, which could be produced on the spot – parchment paper, paper with slithers of wood chip embedded. Choose your own font and thickness of gold lettering; design your own calendar or how about a holy picture. All crafted with care; antiquated, archaic, highly artistic.

On the other side of the Plaza was the Museum of Medicine. However three hundred years ago, what lay behind its huge oak carved doors was something much more sinister and definitely had nothing to do with the preservation of life through medical science. It was the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition, where thousands of heretics, after being arrested on a whim, were interrogated, sentenced to death and executed.