The Plaza de España is Mérida's main civic square, an arcaded space lined with cafes and the seventeenth-century town hall, set just inside the old town between the cathedral and the Roman bridge. It is the obvious meeting point in the city, the place to start a morning with coffee and end an evening with a beer.
The square is unfussy and human-scaled compared with the grander plazas of Salamanca or Madrid. The crowd is local: families, retirees, students from the Extremadura university campus. The cafe terraces fill on summer evenings and stay full late. It is also the obvious place to get oriented — the Templo de Diana is two streets east, the Alcazaba and the Roman bridge two streets south.