Los Jerónimos

For centuries this was the friars‘ orchard and the kings’ garden. Over the grounds of the monastery and the old Buen Retiro palace —⁠which Philip IV had built from 1630 and which was demolished in 1869⁠— the quarter opened up when Isabella II sold the land to the State around 1865. The Calle de Alberto Bosch runs over the convent’s old orchard; the Calle de Felipe IV recalls the king who raised the palace, and the Salón del Estanque borders the artificial lake his gardeners dug between 1634 and 1638. People of standing came to live here: it was the Madrid of the museums, the academies and the ministries. The streets tell two things at once. On the one hand, the kings of the House of Austria and the playwrights who premiered for them at the Coliseo del Buen Retiro: Moreto, a Golden Age dramatist; Montalbán, after Juan Pérez de Montalbán, a disciple of Lope; Ruiz de Alarcón, the playwright born in New Spain. To them are added poets of other centuries —⁠the Cordoban Juan de Mena, author of the Labyrinth of Fortune, and the Poeta Esteban de Villegas, “the swan of the Najerilla”⁠— and painters such as Casado del Alisal and Espalter. The Calle Academia and half of the Calle de Felipe IV face the façade of the Royal Spanish Academy, which settled here in 1894. Toward the park, the names cross the Atlantic: the promenades of Uruguay, Venezuela, Colombia, the República de Cuba, the Avenida de Méjico and the squares of Honduras and Nicaragua, all dedicated to the Spanish American republics when the Retiro passed to the City Council in 1868. And amid so many kings and so many republics, on the slope going down to the Botanical Garden, the Cuesta de Moyano —⁠after Claudio Moyano, the minister behind the 1857 education law⁠— has been selling second-hand books from its wooden stalls since 1925.