Salamanca

Before the gridded blocks, this was the eastern outskirts of Madrid: loose land, the odd convent garden, the Campos Elíseos pleasure park —⁠which opened in 1864 and did not last long⁠— and, at the far end, the Fuente del Berro bullring. The plan was drawn by Carlos María de Castro in 1860, that grid of parallel streets that still orders the neighborhood. And the money was put up by José de Salamanca, who bought cheap land and built luxury houses for a bourgeoisie eager to leave the old center. The statue of the marquis stands in the plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, where the venture began. Almost no one remembers that he himself died in debt. The streets were given, above all, painters' names: Goya, the Aragonese from Fuendetodos; Velázquez, the Sevillian of Las Meninas; Claudio Coello, the last great Madrid Baroque master. And writers: Don Ramón de la Cruz, who wrote sainetes of Madrid life; Ayala, after the playwright Adelardo López de Ayala, who had his house here; the Sevillian Hermanos Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo the poet and Valeriano the painter. There are architects like Villanueva, of the Prado Museum, and Enlightenment scientists: Jorge Juan the mathematician sailor, Lagasca the botanist, Tomás López the king’s cartographer. Four streets in a row keep the memory of the comuneros defeated in 1521: Padilla, Juan Bravo and Maldonado, the three beheaded, and Villalar, the village where they lost. Not all of it is old glory. Serrano recalls the general who dethroned Isabella II, and who lived and died at number 14 of his own street. Príncipe de Vergara was for years General Mola, until in 1981 it was given back the name of general Espartero. In a passage that also once bore Mola’s name, today one reads Enrique Ruano, the student who died in police custody in 1969 in the doorway next door. And amid so many liberal soldiers of the nineteenth century, at one edge of the neighborhood, a modern square bears the name of Margaret Thatcher. Madrid was the first city in the world to give it.