Calle de Magallanes

The name arrived in 1860, when Madrid chose to remember Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese sailor in the service of Castile. His fleet set out in 1519 looking for a westward route to the Spice Islands; he died in the Philippines in 1521, and one of his ships completed the first voyage around the planet three years later. The site once had a funereal past. Where Magallanes meets Calle de Arapiles today stood the entrance to the Cementerio General del Norte, opened in 1809, the first cemetery in the area to disappear. The writer Mariano José de Larra was buried there in 1837. Later, tram sheds were built over the cemetery grounds and the neighborhood shed its old skin to become today’s Chamberí.