Almagro

Before it filled with mansions, this was the northern outskirts of Madrid, a land of orchards and paths where the town came to an end. Along its eastern edge ran the Ronda de Recoletos, the outer perimeter of the city, until in 1864 it was renamed Génova, after the Italian city that tradition holds to be Columbus’s birthplace, in keeping with the square it flows into. When the nineteenth century urbanized the area northward, people with money came to live here, and the neighborhood filled with townhouses and bourgeois residences. Several streets preserve that old layout: the Calle de Fernández de la Hoz, after the Minister of Grace and Justice, was previously called Calle de Chamartín because it pointed toward the road to that village; the Paseo de Eduardo Dato, after the head of government assassinated in 1921, was the Paseo del Cisne; and the Paseo de Martínez Campos, after the general who at Sagunto restored the Bourbons to the throne, was the Paseo del Obelisco. The street map brings together conquistadors and explorers with artists and physicians. There is Almagro himself and, nearby, Ponce de León, who on Easter of 1513 named Florida; García de Paredes, the Extremaduran soldier nicknamed “the Samson of Extremadura”; and Caracas, which honors not a feat but the gratitude of a colonial-goods merchant to the country that supplied his business. Alongside them, the painters: Fortuny, the man from Reus who dazzled Europe and died at thirty-six; Zurbarán and his monks of carved light; and the Españoleto, nickname of José de Ribera in the Naples where he painted almost everything. And the men of science: Jenner, who in 1796 produced the first vaccine; Orfila, the Menorcan father of toxicology; and Morejón, the first historian of Spanish medicine, who gave his name to a stretch of the present-day Calle de Fortuny. The squares mark the old limits of the town. Alonso Martínez, after the jurist who drove the Civil Code forward, was the Glorieta de Santa Bárbara, after the gate that stood at its center until the mid-nineteenth century. The Glorieta de Emilio Castelar, last president of the First Republic, was called del Obelisco after the fountain that presided over it. And where today so many names of conquest cross —⁠of Peru, of Florida, of the Cuzco that cost Almagro his life⁠—⁠, the neighborhood’s only queen, Blanca of Navarre, died a captive of her own family without ever coming to reign.