Calle de Eloy Gonzalo

This street was once named de La Habana. In 1899, with the colonies just lost and spirits still stung by the Disaster of '98, the city council wiped from the map the names that evoked the overseas territories and replaced them with those who had stood out in that war. The street came to honor Eloy Gonzalo García. Gonzalo had been born in Madrid in 1868 and entered the foundling hospital as an abandoned child. In September 1896, during the siege of Cascorro in Cuba, he volunteered to set fire to an insurgent position that was harrying his detachment. He asked to be tied around the waist with a rope, so that his comrades could drag his body back if he fell. He returned alive, with his tin of oil, and the garrison held out until reinforcements arrived. He died the following year in a hospital in Matanzas, before turning thirty. In 1902 his statue was unveiled in the Rastro, and that corner came to be known as Plaza de Cascorro.