Calle de Casto Plasencia

This stretch of Malasaña was born crooked. On Espinosa’s map of 1769 it appears as Cruz de la Zarza, and around 1835 the Council’s papers called it callejón de las Minas, because its only exit gave onto that street. It was a dead end: the other end was not opened toward the Marqués de Santa Ana until 1859, and only then did it rise to the rank of street. The painter who gave it its name had a life out of a novel. Casto Plasencia entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando at fourteen and was among the scholarship holders in Rome, where he painted his enormous Origin of the Roman Republic (1878), awarded prizes at three exhibitions. Back in Madrid he took on the great decorative commissions of the Restoration: the dome of San Francisco el Grande, the Palace of the Marquis of Linares, the Café de Fornos. Pneumonia carried him off on 18 May 1890, after an agony the press followed hour by hour. Thousands came to the funeral, among them Galdós and Sorolla. Madrid reacted quickly: in June of that same year the callejón de las Minas became the calle de Casto Plasencia.