Calle Daoíz

Barely 169 metres separate calle de San Bernardo from the Plaza del Dos de Mayo, and in that very short stretch of Malasaña fits one of the most remembered days in Madrid. The road once skirted the railings of the palace of the Dukes of Monteleón, descendants of Hernán Cortés, which in 1807 Godoy turned into the city’s Artillery Park. At dawn on 2 May 1808, once word spread of the royal family being taken to Bayonne, captains Luis Daoíz and Pedro Velarde broke their orders of neutrality and handed out weapons to the neighbourhood. With four cannon and some eighty civilians they held off two French assaults. Daoíz, his thigh shattered, stayed on his feet leaning against a gun; when Lagrange came to demand surrender and called him “traitor,” he answered with his sabre, and the soldiers finished him with bayonets. When the war ended, the people called the street Daoíz y Velarde, until the magistrate Pontejos split the tribute in 1834–1835. The ruined park was demolished in 1868, and only its entrance arch of 1690 survives. Curiously, the street has above all been a place of classrooms: Spain’s first teacher-training college opened here in 1839.