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Pope Leo XIV walked into Madrid’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Almudena on Monday evening and told the people gathered there to tear down their walls.

He drew the image from the cathedral’s own legend. During a season of persecution, the story goes, an image of the Virgin was sealed inside the wall of Madrid’s ancient citadel, and it was found centuries later, intact, only after part of that wall fell away.

The reunion of a mother and her people became possible, the pope said, precisely because a barrier had come down. The fall of a wall can bring confusion at first, he allowed, and it can also open new possibilities and clear the ground for something to begin again.

Then he turned to the walls of our own moment. Many of them protect no one, Leo told the room. They “divide, separate, and isolate,” and people keep them standing because they would rather not face whatever waits on the other side. “To build something new, beautiful and lasting,” he said, “we must be willing to tear down walls.”

That plea closed a remarkable stretch of days, one that carried the first U.S.-born pope from one enormous Spanish crowd to the next. It is also the through-line I kept hearing across the whole trip, the same builders’ language Leo had been pressing all week in Madrid, where he has rebuked the politics that turns neighbors into threats.

All of it unfolded during the pope’s final hours in a country he had taken by storm — a stretch that would end, of all things, with a private greeting for Bad Bunny.

Here are the details.