Calle de Alonso del Barco

The name honours Alonso del Barco, a painter born in Madrid around 1645 and dead in 1685. He trained alongside José Antolínez and specialised in landscape, then a minor genre beside the saints and portraits that filled the walls of churches and palaces. He was remembered as an excellent landscape painter who worked from memory, with no model before him, and still achieved a beauty that stirred admiration. He painted a great deal, for convents and private houses, yet almost nothing survives with a recognised signature: no work of his has been identified with certainty. He lives more in the archives than in the museums. The street is short and quiet, stretched between Ronda de Valencia and calle de Sebastián Elcano, in the Palos de Moguer neighbourhood. The area began as industrial and was slow to become the residential district it is today.