Calle de Francisco Zea

The man who gives this street its name died at 32 and signed almost everything under borrowed masks. In newspapers such as El Observador or the Semanario Pintoresco Español he appeared as “El Bachiller Sansón Carrasco” or “El Lazarillo de Tormes,” fictional characters behind which he hid his own name. When he died he left his widow and mother with no support, and in 1858 the State paid for an edition of his works to help them. The story took a strange turn nearly two centuries later: in 2025 the Regional Library of Madrid bought an unpublished poem of his, dated 1841 and signed with the altered surname “Francisco Cea.” The street also changed identity several times. It was once called calle de Garrido and calle de Doña Milagros, after the owners of that outlying land, and it lost part of its course when the plaza de San Cayetano was opened.