Calle de Mateo Inurria

Mateo Inurria Lainosa was born in Córdoba in 1867 and died in Madrid in 1924. He modelled nudes of polished surface and serene air that placed him among the most sought-after Spanish sculptors of his day, able to draw from stone an almost warm skin. In 1913 he moved his life to Madrid, and towards the end he bought a country house, the Villa Udia, in the then-empty outskirts of Chamartín. That estate stood on the street that now bears his surname, so the street marks the place where he lived and worked his final years, far from the bustle of a city that had not yet reached this northern edge. Mateo Inurria ends at the plaza de Castilla, that monumental junction where Bravo Murillo and Agustín de Foxá meet beneath the leaning towers. Anyone walking it passes from the memory of a Córdoban who sculpted bodies at rest to the loudest traffic in the capital, in barely eight hundred metres.