Ríos Rosas

For centuries this was open country north of Madrid, land of roads leading out into the open. Here crossed the four ways that gave Cuatro Caminos its name, and earlier still there was a hamlet called Maudes —⁠or Mahudes in its old form⁠— toward where the plaza de Cuzco lies today. When the city grew upward, in the late nineteenth century, the extension began ordering these outskirts into a grid, and the old paseo del Hipódromo —⁠which skirted the Castellana racecourse, demolished in 1933⁠— was turned into the calle de Agustín de Betancourt, the Canary Islands engineer who founded the School of Civil Engineering. The street names filled with men of letters and of the brush. There is the playwright from La Rioja Bretón de los Herreros; the Romantic poet Espronceda; Modesto Lafuente, who signed his satires as Fray Gerundio and wrote a General History of Spain; the painters Alonso Cano, Alenza —⁠who portrayed the poorest⁠— and Ponzano, the sculptor of the lions of the Congress, whose name today marks the street of the tapas bars. Among so many men, two women appear: María de Guzmán, the “Doctor of Alcalá,” the first Spanish woman with a doctorate, and María Panés, of whom not a trace remains of who she was. And there is a corner that looks out on the emperor’s wars: the batalla de Mühlberg, where Charles V defeated the German Protestants, the marqués del Vasto and don Álvaro de Bazán, the admiral of Lepanto, all within a stone’s throw of the calle de Santa Engracia, the Zaragoza martyr. Ríos Rosas, who gives the neighborhood its name, defended his rostrum by force of word, not of sword.