Calle de Joaquín María López

Behind the name is one of the most celebrated voices of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism. Joaquín María López was born in Villena in 1798, studied law in Orihuela, and soon earned a reputation as an orator, one of those who swayed the Cortes with words. His career ran through the most turbulent years of Isabella II’s reign. A deputy from 1834, he took part in the Constitution of 1837, became mayor of Madrid in 1840, and headed the government twice in a single year, 1843. Under his second cabinet the Cortes declared Isabella II of age, though she had not yet turned fourteen, closing the period of regencies. He died in Madrid in 1855, renowned as a tribune and a defense lawyer. The street registry recalls him on this stretch of Gaztambide, a neighborhood that grew at the end of the nineteenth century as a bourgeois expansion, when Madrid was beginning to put on its signs the names of the politicians who had argued over its course.