Ibiza

Before the houses went up, this was countryside east of Madrid, outside the wall that girded the city. The plan that ordered the Ensanche was signed by Carlos María de Castro in 1860, and here it began to be carried out around 1871. To name the new streets they drew on the Balearic Islands: Calle de Menorca, Calle de Ibiza and, on what is now Doctor Castelo, an old Calle de Mallorca. Of that handful of islands spread across parallel streets, it was Ibiza that kept the neighborhood’s name. The other streets draw on politicians from the reign of Isabella II. Narváez is Ramón María Narváez, the general from Loja who headed the government as many as seven times; O’Donnell, his rival Leopoldo O’Donnell, of the Liberal Union, along the line of the old Paseo de Ronda opened up when the wall came down. And among so many statesmen two painters slip in: Antonio Arias, of the Madrid baroque, who died poor in the General Hospital despite having lived well, and the actor Máiquez, Isidoro Máiquez, the great tragedian of his time, a liberal and for that exiled by Ferdinand VII. Doctor Castelo was a physician who spent decades treating syphilis at the Hospital de San Juan de Dios, where the Gregorio Marañón now stands. Two names have a double face. Calle del Doce de Octubre recalls Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean in 1492, but it was earlier called Gómez de Baquero, after a literary critic who signed as Andrenio, and the change came in 1931. And Antonio Acuña is the bishop of Zamora who took up arms with the comuneros and ended up executed at Simancas for killing his jailer. Of all these islands that named the streets, just one made it onto the neighborhood’s plaque; the others are still down there, trodden daily with almost no one noticing.