Calle de la Ilustración
The name refers to the magazine La Ilustración Española y Americana, printed at the Rivadeneyra press behind the street, not to the eighteenth-century movement.
The sign suggests the eighteenth-century movement, but calle de la Ilustración, which runs between the paseo del Rey and calle de Arriaza, owes its name to what once stood at its back.
In 1847 Manuel Rivadeneyra bought some land beside the cuesta de San Vicente and raised a press that grew into one of the country’s great printing houses. From those presses came the Gaceta de Madrid, the volumes of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles and the magazine La Ilustración Española y Americana, a weekly that filled its pages with engravings when photography did not yet exist in the press.
The street, opened in that Argüelles growing over the hill of Príncipe Pío, took the name of its neighbouring publication. The Rivadeneyra building still stands, repurposed, a witness to when this corner of Madrid worked in lead and paper.