Calle del Almirante

For such a short street — barely three hundred and fifty meters from Barquillo to the Paseo de Recoletos — calle del Almirante has carried more names than almost any other in the Justicia neighborhood. On Texeira’s 1656 map it was a dead-end lane closed off by the palace of the Admiral of Castile. By the time Espinosa drew his map in 1769, it already opened onto Recoletos. The admiral was Juan Gaspar Enríquez de Cabrera, owner of the third-largest painting collection in seventeenth-century Spain, behind only the royal collection and that of the Marquis of Carpio. In his palace he arranged a room with twenty-seven works by living Spanish painters, considered today the first attempt at a gallery built on a national criterion. For much of the twentieth century Madrileños called it the calle de las Cesterías, the street of the basket-makers, for its wicker and esparto shops. From one of them came, in 1974, the first shop of Jesús del Pozo, son of the last basket-maker. That gesture turned the street, in the eighties, into a hub of fashion and design during the Movida.