Calle de Concepción Arenal

Malasaña·Universidad

The street was called Horno de la Mata from at least Teixeira’s map (1656). The name came from a public bread oven on that stretch; the owner was, in the most cited version, Juan Mateo de la Mata. The works on the second stretch of the Gran Vía (1917–1922) cut off the start of the street and prompted the renaming to Concepción Arenal, in honour of the Galician writer and reformer (Ferrol, 1820 – Vigo, 1893), a pioneer of modern penitentiary science and the first woman to hold public office in Spain.

Calle de Concepción Arenal today begins at the Gran Vía and ends at the plaza de Santa María Soledad Torres Acosta, but for centuries it had another name and another course. Beside it still opens the Travesía del Horno de la Mata, the only trace of that old layout. On Teixeira’s map of 1656 it appears as calle del Horno de la Mata, after a bread oven whose origin the sources never managed to prove. In the nineteenth century it was a residential, cultured axis: around 1845 the writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda lived here, and at number 7 stood the Society for the Advancement of the Arts. The second stretch of the Gran Vía, opened in 1917, swallowed the street’s southern end, and what remained took the name of Concepción Arenal. Arenal (1820–1893) studied Law disguised as a man; in 1861 she won a prize from the Royal Academy of Moral Sciences signing with her son’s name, and in 1864 she was appointed Inspector of Women’s Prisons, the first public office ever held by a woman in Spain. Her Penitentiary Studies (1877) remain a reference.

Its names

  • Calle del Horno de la MataAntes de 1656 – c. 1920
Sources (8)

Crossings