Calle de Francisco Nieva

It is one of Madrid’s youngest streets. The city named it in late 2023 on the plot where the Vicente Calderón stadium once stood, in the development that replaced Atlético’s old ground by the river. It begins at paseo Imperial and ends at calle de Casimiro Mahou Bierhans. The name recalls Francisco Morales Nieva, born in Valdepeñas in 1924. He came to Madrid to study painting, spent close to a decade in Paris earning his living as an illustrator, and returned reinvented as a set designer and author of his own overflowing, baroque theatre, with plays like La carroza de plomo candente. He held the seat of the letter J at the Royal Spanish Academy and died in 2016, seven years before a neighborhood that still smelled of fresh cement bore his signature.