Calle de Ciudad Real

The name came by rail. A few steps away stands the Delicias station, opened in 1880 before Alfonso XII and María Cristina as the terminus of the Madrid to Ciudad Real and Badajoz Railway Company. From those platforms travelers set off southward, toward La Mancha and the Portuguese border, and the neighborhood’s streets took on the destinations of the line. Ciudad Real, a provincial capital and center of the La Mancha plain, was the main destination of the trains leaving from here. The station was the first in Madrid conceived on a monumental scale, with a wide hall roofed by an iron structure. The building survives and today houses the Railway Museum, with old locomotives under that same vault.