Madrid's Puerta del Sol hosts the famous New Year's Eve clock chimes.
The clock at the Real Casa de Correos in Puerta del Sol is the focus of Spain's best-known televised New Year's countdown. At midnight, people traditionally eat one grape with each of the twelve chimes, a custom associated with good fortune for the twelve months ahead.
The square has long been a symbolic center of Madrid and contains Kilometer Zero, the reference point used for measuring Spain's six national roads. The New Year's broadcast turns its clock tower into a national timekeeper, while celebrations in homes and public squares across Spain follow the same chimes through television.
The grape custom is sometimes attributed to a single harvest surplus, but historians have described a more gradual development involving earlier elite fashion and later commercial promotion. The location itself is Madrid's Puerta del Sol, not Barcelona's Plaça de Catalunya or another Spanish city square.