Calle Antonio Salces
Recalls Antonio Ruiz de Salces, a nineteenth-century architect from Cantabria who designed some of the great public buildings of the Madrid of his time.
Antonio Ruiz de Salces was born in Fresno del Río, in the Cantabrian region of Campoo, in 1820. He came to the capital young, earned his degree from the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, and eventually took a seat there as an academician and as a teacher of the generations that followed.
His signature stayed in stone. He worked alongside Francisco Jareño on the Palace of the National Library and Museums, and around 1870 he raised the Palace of Justice on the remains of the old convent of Las Salesas Reales, the building that housed the Supreme Court for more than a century.
There is a nice coincidence in the fact that his trace also turns up nearby: in 1897, at the end of his life, he took part in carpentry work for the almshouse of the Little Sisters of the Poor on the nearby calle de López de Hoyos. The architect who designed courthouses and libraries across Spain lent a hand, almost in passing, to the district that now bears his name around the corner.