Gaztambide

Before the houses, this was high, bare ground west of Chamberí. In the Middle Ages it was hunting country and, for a time, property of the Templars; later it was cleared for pasture and dry farming, and only near the streams was there the odd market garden. In the late 18th century the sand-diggers set up shop here, extracting sand, along with the brick kilns that fed Madrid’s building —⁠a memory that survives in what is now Calle de Alberto Aguilera, once the Paseo de los Areneros, a dusty ring road that climbed up from the Puerta de Fuencarral. When the Ensanche reached this far in the late 19th century, it was covered with blocks for a comfortable middle class, and the street map filled with the politicians who a few decades earlier had argued over the country’s direction. That’s why so many progressive mayors and orators walk together here: Alberto Aguilera himself, who drove the boulevards; Andrés Mellado, the Malaga journalist who ran El Imparcial, on the street once called Tarifa; Joaquín María López, the lawyer who twice headed the government in 1843; Calvo Asensio, pharmacist and deputy, on what was the old Calle de Marconell in the Chamberí outskirts; and Abdón Terradas, republican mayor of Figueras. Alongside them, the harsher names of 19th-century thought: Donoso Cortés, who went from liberalism to a hardline Catholicism, and Meléndez Valdés, the great Enlightenment poet who died in exile as a Bonapartist sympathizer. And since the neighborhood was born from a musician’s name, other artists followed. Hilarión Eslava, Navarrese like Gaztambide, chapel master and an authority on sacred music. The Golden Age painters: Antonio Palomino, who was also the first historian of Spanish art, and Francisco Rizi, painter to the king, on the street once called San Fausto. Further back still, the Arcipreste de Hita, who in the 14th century wrote the Libro de Buen Amor. Only Guzmán el Bueno brings war: the knight who in 1294 let his son be killed rather than surrender Tarifa. In a neighborhood named after a path of chestnut trees, there isn’t a single chestnut; what abound are zarzuelas, sermons, and battles written on the corners.