Calle de Francisco Navacerrada

In the late 1880s, developer Mariano Santos Pinela and architect Julián Marín began building a colony of terraced Neo-Mudéjar houses on Madrid’s eastern outskirts. They called it Madrid Moderno and set it beside La Guindalera, then almost open country. The project soon foundered: lawsuits with the council over missing permits dragged the venture into bankruptcy. Here the man who names the street enters. In 1893, the contractor Francisco Navacerrada Sánchez bought the 62 houses already standing, paid the outstanding municipal fines and commissioned the completion and expansion of the complex. That investor-contractor turned an urban failure into the first experiment in housing for workers and the lower middle class on the city’s eastern edge. The speculation of the 1970s razed nearly all the original villas, but anyone passing numbers 3 and 5 of the calle de Francisco Navacerrada still sees two survivors standing, with their exposed brick and their jutting glazed balcony leaning out over the pavement.

Between December 1931 and May 1932, Miguel Hernández lived at number 4 of this street, working as the janitor of the Academia Morante in exchange for lodging and with no right to meals —⁠according to most sources⁠—⁠, although the Madrid City Council states in its press release that the compensation also included board. In that room he wrote the verses that would make up Perito en Lunas, published in 1933. Number 4 was later removed from the street directory; the commemorative plaque that the City Council placed on 28 March 2022, on the 80th anniversary of the poet’s death, therefore appears at number 2 of the same street.