Ciudad Universitaria

Before the lecture halls, this was open country to the northwest of Madrid: the high grounds of the Moncloa estate, with its little palace, its hills and its paths toward the mountains. In 1927 Alfonso XIII ceded the area to bring all the faculties together here, which until then had been scattered around the center. The Civil War caught the campus half-built and turned it into the front line for nearly three years; when it ended, it had to be rebuilt almost entirely. That is why the neighborhood is what it says it is: the city where the university stands. The streets pull toward the medical and scientific side, which is what weighs most around here. The avenida del Doctor Federico Rubio y Galí recalls the surgeon from Cádiz who brought modern surgery to Spain and set up the first school of secular nurses. The calle de Francos Rodríguez bears the name of José Francos Rodríguez, physician and journalist who was twice mayor of Madrid under Alfonso XIII. And the calle de Isaac Peral honors the sailor from Cartagena who built the first submarine in the world driven solely by electricity and armed with torpedoes. Not everything is coat and scalpel. The avenida de Pablo Iglesias recalls the Galician typographer who founded the PSOE and the UGT and brought workers into Spanish politics. The plaza del Marqués de Comillas names Claudio López Bru, the Catholic financier who turned a seminary into a pontifical university, and a few steps away the plaza de Cristo Rey proclaims Jesus Christ sovereign over all. Among so many faculties and residence halls, on these hills people still study the same thing they studied the day they opened: almost everything.