Avenida de Alfonso XIII

Alfonso XIII reigned before he could walk. He was born a king on 17 May 1886, because his father, Alfonso XII, had died months earlier. His mother, María Cristina of Habsburg, ruled as regent until the boy turned sixteen and swore the Constitution in 1902. His was a reign of upheavals. He inherited a country that had just lost Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, survived a bomb on his wedding day to Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg in 1906, and ended up sheltering the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. In April 1931 he left for exile and died in Rome ten years later. The avenida de Alfonso XIII runs through Chamartín, linking the Nueva España and Hispanoamérica neighborhoods, laid out when those northern estates were being developed as a middle-class extension. It is a long, straight north-south axis that residents cross every day.