Do you remember Scotty, the journalist of that unforgettable science-fiction classic, today a cult film, which is ‘The enigma of another world', produced by Howard Hawks? Do you remember his last words, broadcast to the whole world from a polar base, those that said: ‘Watch the sky. Don't be careless. Keep watching the sky’.

Well, as incredible or exaggerated as it may seem to you, I make the same recommendation, if one day the destination and a good offer from your travel agency turns you into visitors from Madrid and you wish to take back to your country some curious or at least picturesque souvenir.

Madrid is a city that, like the Hogwarths school, you know, the Harry Potter series, has an intense and magical life in its heights, which generally goes unnoticed, not only by a great majority of Madrid's citizens, but also by practically all the tourists who continually visit it, without a doubt making the slogan ‘Madrid, destination seven stars' good.
Part of that life, which we could describe as strange or at least unusual, can be found in the bewildering decoration of what is popularly known as ‘the House of Lizards'.

The building, very close to the popular Plaza de Santa Bárbara - with its terraces and its innumerable leisure and restaurant premises - is a period building, located at the confluence of two important arteries in Madrid: Hortaleza Street and Mejía Lequerica Street.

The building, of modernist style and designed by the architect Benito González del Valle, in the period between 1910 and 1912, has the added particularity of being one of the few buildings of the capital, influenced by the Austrian architecture of the early twentieth century. Detail, which in comparison with the curious ornamentation it shows, is usually always in the background.

And in a certain way, seen from a purely romantic point of view, it makes sense to speculate, since the lizard or the salamanders -as some affirm- have always been animals whose symbolism has related them to esotericism, alchemy and occultism. These concepts would give such a singular architectural exponent an added value, causing all sorts of fantasies and urban legends to hover over it, which have little or nothing to do with its true object and reality.

WARNING: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.