Calle de la Estrella

Calle de la Estrella drops from Calle de Silva to Carrera de San Bernardo, in the Universidad district. Its name was already written on Texeira’s 1656 map, among the oldest documented in the town’s northwest, and the old Estrella quarter grew up around it. Répide preserved the astronomical legend of the hill that named the place, where astrologers gathered in the fifteenth century to watch a comet pass, later taken as an omen of plague. Something rare in Madrid happens here: the street never changed its name. It crossed the nineteenth century, the Restoration and the Franco years without any political turn renaming it. On 23 January 1977, on the corner of Silva, a far-right group opened fire on Arturo Ruiz García, a twenty-year-old marching in a demonstration for amnesty. He was the first death of Madrid’s “Black Week,” a spell of violence that hastened the legalisation of the Communist Party and altered the course of the Transition. The plaque that recalls him is not at the exact spot where he fell but moved to the nearby Plaza de Soledad Torres Acosta.