Calle de Bailén

Calle de Bailén drops between the plaza de España and the plaza de San Francisco el Grande, and few streets gather so much power along their pavements: the Royal Palace on one side, the Senate on the other, and the Almudena cathedral closing the horizon to the south. For centuries it was not even a street. Texeira’s 1656 map shows there a tangle of convent walls and dead-end alleys beside the old Alcázar. Everything changed on Christmas Eve 1734, when the Alcázar burned and Philip V decided to raise the present Royal Palace; the axis took shape under Charles III, with Sabatini lining up the Royal Stables. The soul of the street hangs in the air. The viaduct spans the 23-metre drop over calle de Segovia. The first iron footbridge, opened in 1874, was born lame: a cart loaded with flour once burst through its deck. In 1934 it was demolished and the present concrete one raised, inaugurated in 1942. In time the viaduct earned a grim fame as a place of suicides, and mayor Álvarez del Manzano had the acrylic screens installed that now line it.