Calle de Aguirre
Named after Lucas Aguirre y Juárez (Cuenca, 1800 — Madrid, 1873), a merchant who left his fortune to found three free schools, among them Madrid’s Escuelas Aguirre, a Moorish Revival building by Emilio Rodríguez Ayuso (1881-1886).
Lucas Aguirre y Juárez was born in Cuenca in 1800. The family fortune came from a contract for the stagecoach and mail service between Madrid and Cuenca, and it grew when Mendizábal put Church property up for sale in 1836. He never married and had no children.
In his old age he moved to Madrid, drew close to the Krausist circles and embraced an idea then scandalous: secular teaching, free of sermons, open to girls as well. He died in 1873, leaving his estate to three schools. Emilio Rodríguez Ayuso raised the Madrid one between 1881 and 1886 at the edge of the Retiro, with a gymnasium, a library and a weather observatory. The first classes rang out on 18 October 1886, the day their founder would have marked his birthday.
Calle de Aguirre skirts that plot and keeps the surname of the ironmonger turned benefactor. The building still stands; since 2006 it has housed the Casa Árabe.