Calle de Guillermo de Osma

Behind the name is a man of the world born in Havana in 1853, son of a Peruvian diplomat and a Cuban landowner. Guillermo de Osma y Scull studied at the Sorbonne and at Oxford, where he was the first Spaniard to enroll after England’s old universities opened to non-Anglicans. From there he moved into diplomacy and served two terms as minister of finance under Alfonso XIII. His other life was that of a collector. He assembled one of Spain’s finest collections of lustreware and Hispano-Muslim tilework and, with his wife Adela Crooke, Countess of Valencia de Don Juan, founded in 1916 the institute that guards those holdings. The street runs through the Chopera neighborhood and skirts a corner of the Pico del Pañuelo, the housing estate built around 1930 for workers of the nearby slaughterhouse. Anyone walking it passes the municipal market that also inherited his name.