Calle de Lazaga

This street was once called Mindanao, after one of the Philippine islands Spain lost in 1898. In 1899 the city council replaced that colonial name with Juan Bautista Lazaga y Garay, an officer killed in the same defeat. Lazaga commanded the armored cruiser Oquendo when Admiral Cervera’s squadron was bottled up in Santiago de Cuba against a far superior American fleet. On 3 July 1898 the Spanish ships sailed out into the open and he died aboard that day. His name entered Madrid’s streets alongside other officers of that “disaster of '98,” in a Tetuán then growing on the city’s edge.