Calle de León Gil de Palacio

The street takes its name from León Gil de Palacio (Barcelona, 1778 – Segovia, 1849), an infantry brigadier and director of the Royal Topographical Studies Cabinet, whose best-known work is the 1830 scale model of Madrid, now kept at the Museum of the History of Madrid. The council gave the street this name on 27 May 1982, when developing the former railway docks of the Pacífico neighbourhood, an area left without residential use since the early 20th century.

Where the Calle de León Gil de Palacio now runs there were once goods warehouses and railway wharves, right up against Atocha station. When the council developed the plot in 1982, it named the street after an artilleryman from Barcelona who had turned the whole of Madrid into a wooden miniature. León Gil de Palacio joined the army in 1796 and fought in the Peninsular War, but he left his mark not on the battlefield but at the model-maker’s table. By a Royal Order of 1828, Ferdinand VII asked him for a topographical model of Madrid, which he finished in October 1830. The model measures 5.21 by 3.53 metres at a scale of 1:816, made of poplar wood, silk, thread, earth and metals. It reproduces the Madrid enclosed within the wall of Philip IV and records, for the first time, the courtyards and open spaces hidden inside the blocks. A pocket-sized Madrid you can still travel through with your eyes. The street’s name got off to a stumble. The 1982 resolution wrote “Palacios”, with an extra s, and it had to be corrected the next day to give the artilleryman his exact surname.

Sources (7)