Calle de Carlos Rubio

Carlos Rubio y Colell reached Madrid around the age of sixteen, his head full of verses and short on means. Born in Córdoba in 1833, he died in the capital in 1871, before turning forty. He signed poems under the pen name Pablo Gambara and made a name as one of the most feared polemicists of progressive journalism. His platform was the newspaper La Iberia. There he wrote alongside Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, and when Sagasta joined the government after the triumph of the 1868 revolution, Rubio took over the paper’s editorship. He had been fully involved in the conspiracies against Isabella II. Galdós portrayed him in his national episode Prim as a one-eyed, pockmarked man dressed like a beggar, yet brilliant and wholly devoted to the cause: the most selfless of all who worked for that revolution. The calle de Carlos Rubio runs through Bellas Vistas between Tenerife and Pedro Barreda.