Calle de Don Ramón de la Cruz
The street takes its name from Ramón Francisco de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla (Madrid, 1731-1794), a writer of one-act comic sketches who portrayed Madrid’s popular life in more than three hundred short pieces. The council named the street when laying out the Ensanche de Salamanca under the Castro Plan, approved in 1860.
The calle de Don Ramón de la Cruz was born with the Ensanche that Carlos María de Castro began sketching in 1860. Its first houses went up between 1863 and 1870, and today it runs from calle de Serrano to plaza de Manuel Becerra, among the longest streets of the Ensanche in that area.
The man who gives it its name, Ramón de la Cruz (Madrid, 1731-1794), earned his living as a clerk in the royal fines office, but his name endured through what he wrote in his free hours. He signed more than three hundred sainetes, those short, spicy sketches in which he portrayed the ordinary Madrilenian with a chronicler’s eye. In El Prado por la noche and La pradera de San Isidro he recorded how the city’s common folk spoke, strolled and argued.
He died in 1794 far from his clerk’s desk: at the home of the Countess-Duchess of Benavente, on calle de Alcalá, the very street his own would end up brushing against a century later.
In 1900 Madrid’s City Council paid tribute to Ramón de la Cruz by placing a commemorative plaque on the building on Calle de Alcalá where the playwright had died in 1794. The plaque was fixed to the façade facing the corner with Calle de Cedaceros, but the dwelling where Cruz died —in the house of the Countess-Duchess of Benavente— faced only Alcalá and did not form a corner. The error persisted: in 1991 the City Council installed a new diamond-shaped plaque at number 3 of Cedaceros without correcting the location.