  The classical spacetime is usually described by a differentiable manifold
with infinitely many degrees of freedom. Occasionally though, it is useful to
consider an approximation whose number of degrees of freedom is finite. There
are several discrete models of spacetime like that, some of which have been
used to build a (simplified) representation of a black hole. We will shortly
revisit these discrete black hole models. Then we limit ourselves to one
particular case and show how it can be inhabited by quantum matter fields. It
is suggested that the field dynamics should be described by the framework of
discrete canonical evolution, and we point out some of the most significant
implications of this approach.
