Calle de Fernández Silvestre

Behind the name lie a soldier out of a novel and one of the greatest catastrophes of the Spanish army. Manuel Fernández Silvestre was born in 1871 in El Caney, in still-Spanish Cuba. He left the Toledo Infantry Academy as a cavalry lieutenant and was hardened in the Cuban war, where he took sixteen wounds, one of them nearly costing him his left arm. Back on the mainland he became an aide to Alfonso XIII, who was taken with his brash, flashy character. His inner circle of officers were nicknamed “los Manolos,” and royal favor pushed him up the ranks until he was given command of the troops at Melilla. There, in the summer of 1921, he launched a reckless advance into the Rif interior without securing supplies. Abd el-Krim’s revolt turned the retreat from Annual into a rout: more than ten thousand dead in a few days. Silvestre vanished on 22 July 1921 and his body was never identified with certainty. One account says he shot himself when he saw the disaster; a Moroccan witness claimed to recognize his corpse by the sash and a general’s epaulettes.