Calle de Fortunata y Jacinta

Two women give this street its name, and neither existed: Fortunata and Jacinta are the protagonists of Benito Pérez Galdós’s great Madrid novel, published in 1887. Galdós set them against each other as two sides of the same passion. Jacinta, the bourgeois wife, unable to have children. Fortunata, the woman of the people, fertile and overflowing, caught in desire for the same man. The name is recent. Until 2017 the street was called General Orgaz, after a Francoist officer, and it was among the batch of streets the City Council renamed under the historical memory law. Galdós’s heroines were chosen to honour the novelist. The novel unfolds through Chamberí, the plaza de Pontejos or the cava de San Miguel, not through these Cuatro Caminos plots, land almost empty in Galdós’s day and built up only in the mid-twentieth century, when Fortunata had been ink for decades.