Calle de Ferraz

The name comes from a soldier of the Aragonese Pyrenees. Valentín Ferraz Barrau was born in Anciles, in the Benasque valley, in 1792. He fought in America, in the Army of Peru, and returned to the Peninsula to rise to lieutenant general. He was minister of war four times and, for barely two weeks in August 1840, held the presidency of the Council of Ministers in the last days of the regency of María Cristina de Borbón. Years later he was mayor of Madrid. The street wasn’t always so named. It was once la calle de San Marcial, and in 1865 the council gave it the general’s surname. The surname weighs today for reasons apart from his life. Number 70 of Ferraz has been the headquarters of the PSOE since 1982, and Pablo Iglesias had died in that same building in 1925. The composer Giacomo Puccini passed along this street too, lodged at number 7 during a Madrid stay in 1892.