Calle de Martínez Izquierdo

On Palm Sunday, 18 April 1886, on the steps of the Colegiata de San Isidro, a priest drew a pistol and fired three times at the man who gives this Calle de Martínez Izquierdo its name. The victim was Narciso Martínez Izquierdo, first bishop of Madrid-Alcalá. He died the next day. He was born in 1830 in a village in Guadalajara, was ordained a priest in 1857 and served as bishop of Salamanca before Leo XIII placed him at the head of the newly created Madrid-Alcalá diocese, of which he was the first holder. His killer, Cayetano Galeote Cotilla, was a priest the bishop himself had removed from his chaplaincy during a disciplinary reform. He was declared insane and confined to the Leganés asylum, where he died more than three decades later. The street opened soon after that shot: an 1889 Madrid directory already describes it as recently opened, so the plaque must have been placed between 1886 and 1888.

Galeote was sentenced to death in late 1886, but in December 1887 the forensic doctors declared him insane and the sentence was commuted. He spent more than thirty years in the Leganés asylum, where he died on 3 April 1922. Galdós devoted three articles to the case in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa (May and October 1886), and the trial was one of the most closely followed of the Restoration.