Calle de Fortuny
Honors Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, the painter from Reus who dazzled nineteenth-century Europe before dying at thirty-six.
Until 1875 the first stretch was called calle de Morejón, after the enlightened physician Antonio Hernández Morejón. That year Madrid renamed it for a painter then on everyone’s lips across Europe.
Fortuny was born in Reus in 1838 and orphaned as a child. A trip to North Africa during the war of 1860 left in his painting an intense light he never abandoned. His masterpiece, La vicaría, captures the vibrant, meticulous brushwork that made him famous: a dealer bought it for 70,000 francs and resold it for 250,000. He died in Rome in 1874, aged thirty-six.
The street, one of the grandest in Almagro, runs from calle de Fernando el Santo to paseo del General Martínez Campos. The Residencia de Estudiantes had its first home here, and the German embassy and the José Ortega y Gasset Foundation still stand along it.