Calle de Barceló

Calle de Barceló runs down from Fuencarral toward Mejía Lequerica over ground that for more than a century belonged to the Royal Hospice of San Fernando, whose Baroque doorway, carved by Pedro de Ribera, still exists, incorporated into the Museum of the History of Madrid. When the city tore down the wall and opened the neighborhood, the council named three streets after sailors: Barceló, Churruca, and Apodaca. Antonio Barceló began as a cabin boy on his father’s xebec and rose to lieutenant general of the Royal Navy without a single noble name to push him along. He spent decades hunting Barbary corsairs and freed more than a thousand Christian captives. When Charles III entrusted him with the blockade of Gibraltar, he invented the gunboats — armored rowing craft clad in cork and iron that attacked by night; the besieged British admitted they had never faced a more fearsome enemy. In 1931 Luis Gutiérrez Soto built the Cine Barceló at number 11, with ribbon windows and portholes that mimic a ship’s deck: a nod to the sailor who gives the street its name. It later became the Teatro Barceló and, from 1980, the Pachá nightclub, one of the beacons of the Movida.