Avenida del Presidente Carmona

Behind the name is a Portuguese soldier who held the office of head of state for a quarter of a century. António Óscar de Fragoso Carmona (1869-1951) took part in the 1926 coup, assumed the presidency and held it until his death, by then under the Estado Novo led by Salazar. During his rule, Portugal drew closer to Franco’s Spain and signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression with it in 1939. The avenue, named in 1949, reflected that closeness between the two Iberian regimes, and its most visible moment was Franco’s visit to Lisbon that same year. In Portugal, references to the marshal all but vanished from the street map after the Carnation Revolution of 1974. In Madrid the opposite happened: when the City Council removed Francoist names from the Tetuán district in 2018, the Avenida del Presidente Carmona was not among those renamed. His standing as a foreign head of state, outside Spanish Francoism, has been suggested as a possible reason.