Calle de Herreros de Tejada

The name honours Luis Herreros de Tejada y Villaldea (1867-1942), a Madrid painter trained at the San Fernando Academy. He worked in history and landscape painting, earned mentions at Paris competitions, and at the 1890 National Exhibition presented a canvas of Alfonso XI establishing the municipality of Madrid. As a court steward to Alfonso XIII, he dealt with the royal household for three decades. The city council named this street after him in 1954. The surname has the root of a trade. It comes from the line of the Solar de Tejada, an ancestral house in Laguna de Cameros (La Rioja) whose legend traces it back to a knight of the battle of Clavijo. One of its branches took the name of the herreros, the blacksmiths, so the surname ties the ironworker’s trade to the lesser nobility of Cameros. The street lies in the heart of the Hispanoamérica district, thick with the names of cities and countries across the Atlantic, from Lima to Cuzco, from Potosí to Valparaíso. Among that neighbourhood of American place names, Herreros de Tejada sounds more like a Rioja forge than an overseas capital.