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A 300-Year-Old Flame Still Burns: The World’s Oldest Restaurant Is Full of History and Mystery

Sobrino de Botín has survived invasions, civil war, and global pandemics without ever closing its doors.
A 300-Year-Old Flame Still Burns: The World’s Oldest Restaurant Is Full of History and Mystery
The original building was constructed in the late 16th century, and the restaurant has operated since the 18th century. Travel-Fr/Shutterstock
Walker Larson
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At the heart of a brick building on the street of Cuchilleros, the “knifemakers,” in Madrid, a fire burns. It has burned there continuously for 300 years. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, the fire had already been lit for 83 years. When the Spanish Civil War rocked the streets of Madrid in the 1930s, damaging one of the balconies of the old brick building, the flame smoldered on. Even when all the world was quarantined during COVID-19, the fire in this building continued, quietly, to glow.
The fire in question is the oven flame of the world’s oldest restaurant according to the Guinness World Records—Sobrino de Botín—and it forms the establishment’s flickering heart, a living relic of a lost age, kept constantly alight lest temperature fluctuations should cause the antique granite oven to crack. When asked by Smithsonian magazine how the restaurant has kept the flames going for so long, the establishment’s co-owner, Antonio González, replied with Promethean confidence, “We steal the fire from the gods.”
Walker Larson
Walker Larson
Author
Before becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master’s in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, “Hologram” and “Song of Spheres.”