Calle de Guzmán el Bueno
The street honors Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, “the Good,” a thirteenth-century Castilian knight who defended Tarifa at the price of his own son’s life.
Behind the name is a dagger thrown from a wall. Alonso Pérez de Guzmán (1256-1309), warden of Tarifa on King Sancho IV’s orders, watched the besiegers capture his son and threaten to kill him unless he surrendered the town. He refused: according to the tale that crossed the centuries, he flung his own dagger down from the wall so they would carry out the threat. The boy died, the siege failed, and the knight passed into posterity as “the Good.”
Madrid moved that legend to Chamberí, where calle de Guzmán el Bueno crosses Gaztambide, Arapiles, and Vallehermoso in a straight line nearly two kilometers long.
It was not always a paved street. On the eve of the Civil War sheep still grazed on land the city was only beginning to build up. Nothing recalls it now but the name, which the metro station on lines 6 and 7 has made familiar.