Calle de María Teresa

Calle de María Teresa springs from a Madrid growing in fits and starts. From 1874, the owners of the land between Francisco Silvela, Alcalá and today’s M-30 carved up their fields and sold them off as plots: that is how the Guindalera neighbourhood took shape. On that parcelling arose, from 1890, the Madrid Moderno colony, with villas of Neo-Mudéjar and Modernist air, each street named after some public figure of the moment. To that parade of names was added the Infanta María Teresa de Borbón y Austria, daughter of Alfonso XII, born in 1882. Her story has the edge of royal misfortune: she died at twenty-nine of an embolism, barely eight days after bringing her fourth daughter into the world. A last nuance for the curious walker: no classic chronicler left a record of whom this street honours. The infanta fits by dates and by the neighbourhood’s atmosphere, but the attribution remains a well-founded guess, not a certainty carved in stone.