Calle de Fernando el Católico

The street recalls Ferdinand II of Aragon, called “the Catholic,” born in Sos in 1452 and dead in Madrigalejo in 1516. His marriage to Isabella of Castile in 1469 joined two crowns that until then had looked in different directions, and from that union came the framework of the modern Spanish monarchy: the taking of Granada, Columbus’s voyage, the annexation of Navarre. Machiavelli took him as his model of the cunning prince. The name reached the streets of northern Madrid in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ensanche was beginning to trace grids over the old open ground of Chamberí. The naming was tangled for a while, until in 1880 the city council moved the sign to its longer parallel street, which keeps it today. At the end of the street, beneath the arcades of some military housing, stands since 1956 the monument to the aviators of the Plus Ultra, who in 1926 crossed the South Atlantic by seaplane.