Calle de Méndez Álvaro

Before it carried a doctor’s name, this street was the camino de Yeseros, a dusty track that ran down from the Puerta de Atocha beside the Carcabón stream. Carters brought plaster into the city this way, and here, drawn by the railway, grew the crowded suburb of Arganzuela. In 1884 the city council named it after Francisco Méndez Álvaro, a physician by training whose real obsession was public health: draft health laws, early measures against cholera, the organization of state vaccination. He chaired the Royal National Academy of Medicine and held the mayor’s office in Madrid for barely a month in 1843. Today the calle de Méndez Álvaro, long and busy between the train station and the M-30 ring road, follows the line of the road that once gave the plasterers their name.