Calle de Álvarez Gato

For centuries this passage was the callejón del Gato, the Cat’s Alley, and the nickname carries a story no one has been able to date: that of a family ancestor who, during the Christian conquest of Madrid, scaled the wall armed only with a knife. He climbed so nimbly that he was compared to a cat, and from that byword came the name still given to anyone born in the city. The alley’s real fame came another way. In the early twentieth century two distorting mirrors were set up here, and it was before them that Valle-Inclán placed Max Estrella to deliver his definition of the esperpento in Luces de Bohemia. Whoever looks in today stands on the exact corner where Max gazed at his reflection and declared that the tragic sense of Spanish life can only be told through a deformed aesthetic.