Calle de Fernández de los Ríos

Ángel Fernández de los Ríos (Madrid, 1821 – Paris, 1880) was a journalist, publisher, politician and urban planner. His book El futuro Madrid sketched a capital of broad avenues, parks and clean air. On his plan he laid out here a great tree-lined street he wanted to name Alameda de Stephenson, in tribute to the inventor of the locomotive; the avenue was never opened as he imagined it, but the neighborhood ended up honoring him with this street, of similar layout. The street crosses Chamberí from east to west, through Gaztambide and Arapiles, from Bravo Murillo to near Moncloa. It was slow to complete: the stretch between Magallanes and Vallehermoso was occupied by the cemetery of San Ginés and San Luis, closed in 1884 and not fully gone until well into the 1920s. Fernández de los Ríos never saw his dreamed-of Madrid. In 1876 the conservative government arrested him and took him to the Portuguese border; he died in Paris four years later.