Calle de la Reina Mercedes

Behind the name is a queen who barely became one. María de las Mercedes of Orleans and Bourbon was born in Madrid in 1860, daughter of the Dukes of Montpensier, and married Alfonso XII in January 1878. The match had grown out of a love that family politics viewed with suspicion, because it tied the king to a rival dynastic branch. The marriage lasted five months. Mercedes died on June 26, 1878, two days after turning eighteen, from a fever now attributed to typhus. Her loss struck Madrid with unusual force, and the city set new words to an old medieval ballad: “Where are you going, Alfonso XII, where are you going, sad as you are?”, a refrain that crossed generations and is still recognized. The street lies in the heart of Cuatro Caminos, where at the end of the nineteenth century the humble population grew in fits and starts around the roundabout where the camino de Francia and the calle de Santa Engracia met. Her remains rested for more than a century in El Escorial; in the year 2000 they were moved to the Almudena cathedral, the church Alfonso XII had promoted partly with her in mind.