Calle de la Beneficencia

Some streets only show their back. Calle de la Beneficencia, linking Fuencarral with Mejía Lequerica in the Justicia quarter, was born flush against the flank of the Real Hospicio de San Fernando. That is why almost no important building faces it: the passer-by sees rear walls, blind masonry and service doors. The hospice, with Pedro de Ribera’s Baroque doorway at Fuencarral 78, kept the noble face; the courtyard was left to Beneficencia. Chroniclers were unkind to it. Répide painted it as a gloomy alley where every kind of filth settled. And that is its charm: here the palaces look the other way. The palace of the Dukes of Veragua, built by Matías Laviña for Columbus’s descendants, turns its façade toward San Mateo; the Museo del Romanticismo also gives it its back. Only number 18 breaks the rule. The Anglican Cathedral of the Redeemer sets its neo-Gothic front squarely on the street, the only one that deigns to look at it. When they tried to consecrate it in 1892 the government blocked the opening, arguing that the Constitution tolerated reformed worship only in private premises; it finally opened in 1894 on two humiliating conditions, removing the cross and erasing the Latin inscription from the frontispiece.