Calle de Augusto Figueroa

Calle de Augusto Figueroa runs west to east from Fuencarral to Barquillo, in the heart of the Justicia neighborhood. Texeira’s map already drew it in 1656 as Santa María del Arco: the name came from an altarpiece of the Virgin of Solitude hung above the arch of the stables of the Marquis of Torrecilla. Local devotion grew until the marquis himself paid, around 1712, for a small chapel of exposed brick that still stands in its corner, barely thirty-five square meters. In 1904 the street took the name it keeps. Augusto Suárez de Figueroa was then the most famous journalist in Madrid: he had founded El Heraldo de Madrid, brought engravings onto its pages, and hired Carmen de Burgos, “Colombine,” as Spain’s first woman war correspondent. His articles against General Salamanca ended in a sabre duel in Málaga on 1 January 1904, from which he came away mortally wounded. In the twentieth century the street gained a second, commercial skin: from 1945, beside the San Antón market, it filled with shoe shops until it held more of them than any other street in Madrid. At number 29 Enrique Jardiel Poncela was born in 1901.