Avenida Recuerdo

Here stretched the Quinta del Recuerdo, a country estate of the Dukes of Pastrana and Infantado in the old Chamartín de la Rosa, then a village independent of Madrid. The house had gathered this land since the seventeenth century, among pine woods and orchards. The name Quinta del Recuerdo was set around the mid-nineteenth century, when one of the Álvarez de Toledo family spent a convalescence there and kept fond memory of the stay. In 1879 the duke ceded the estate to the Society of Jesus, then re-establishing itself in Spain after the expulsions of the previous century. On 24 September 1880 the Jesuits opened the school of Nuestra Señora del Recuerdo, conceived to continue the tradition of the old Colegio Imperial, where Lope, Quevedo and Calderón had studied. The school inherited the estate’s name, and the Avenida del Recuerdo took it in turn from the school. The street barely reaches a hundred meters, scant for the word “avenida.” It runs in front of the school, with its neo-Gothic church among the trees, the last visible remnant of that Pastrana estate.