Calle de Avendaño
The street bears the name of Francisco de Avendaño, a 16th-century Spanish playwright whose only known work is the Comedia Florisea (1551). It lies in the Niño Jesús district, in Retiro, within the Colonia del Retiro laid out between 1925 and 1932.
Between the Retiro park and the old Paseo de Ronda, the Colonia del Retiro grew up in the 1920s. The architects Fernando de Escondrillas and Luis de Alburquerque laid out its streets between 1925 and 1932 and chose a shared criterion for naming them: figures from the 16th to the 18th century. That is why Martín Sarmiento, Juan de la Cueva and Juan de Urbieta live side by side here, and among them slips Avendaño.
Francisco de Avendaño was a mid-16th-century playwright so elusive that we do not know when he was born or when he died. His trace comes down to a single work, the Comedia Florisea, in a 1551 edition that does not even say where it was printed.
What gives this almost invisible author stature is the shape of his play: the Florisea is among the first texts to divide the action into three acts. No record survives of why exactly a Madrid street carries his surname; it simply fits the roster of names the architects spread through the colony.