Calle de Bernardo López García

Before it bore a poet’s name, this street was a gap in the wall: here stood the Conde Duque gate, one of the minor openings in the rampart with which Philip IV enclosed Madrid in the seventeenth century. The wall came down in 1868, but the street remained calle del Portillo for almost sixty more years. Today it links the travesía del Conde Duque with Amaniel, in the Universidad district. The renaming came through a poem. Bernardo López García, a man from Jaén settled in Madrid, published his ode “El dos de mayo” on 2 May 1866, and four lines were enough to make him famous overnight: “the bell and the cannon.” They called him “the bard of the Second of May,” and that success swallowed everything else he wrote. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-one, at number 9 of this very street. In 1925, a committee of Jaén natives living in Madrid renamed the street after him and placed at that number 9 a bronze plaque by the sculptor Jacinto Higueras, with the poet’s profile and scenes of the uprising.

López García died on 15 November 1870 at number 9 of this street, which at the time was still called Calle del Portillo. Thirty-seven days later Bécquer died, also in Madrid. Both poets, of the same generation but different aesthetics, died in the same autumn in the same city, with no record that they ever met. The plaque that today marks López García’s house was unveiled precisely on 2 May 1925 —⁠fifty-five years after his death and on the anniversary of the uprising his ode immortalizes.