Calle de Herrera

The surname Herrera brings together several figures of the Spanish Golden Age, and Madrid’s street register left no record of which one this Valdeacederas street honors. The dedication points to art and letters. If one looks to painting, the firmest candidate is Francisco de Herrera the Elder, a Sevillian born around 1590 and dead in Madrid around 1654. He had a reputation for a harsh temper: tradition holds that no pupil could bear his workshop and that even his own children left him. The young Velázquez passed through it briefly before seeking a gentler master. If the gaze turns to poetry, the name evokes Fernando de Herrera, “the Divine,” the Sevillian master of sixteenth-century verse. The street belongs to a layout of Tetuán that arose when the slum filled with low houses around the turn of the twentieth century, on the old land of the “val de acederas” that gives the neighborhood its name.