Calle de Muñoz Torrero

A street opened in 1864 by the La Peninsular property company over the garden of the old convent of San Basilio Magno. That community had settled in 1611 on calle del Desengaño, which the neighbours soon renamed de los Basilios; under that nickname it appears on Texeira’s 1656 map. Mendizábal’s disentailment dissolved it in 1836, and on the site rose a short-lived theatre that vanished in 1864. That same year La Peninsular opened the street and named it after Diego Muñoz Torrero, coinciding with the return of his remains from Portugal. Muñoz Torrero was the first to speak at the inaugural session of the Cortes of Cádiz, on 24 September 1810, where he proposed national sovereignty, separation of powers, freedom of the press and the abolition of the Inquisition. He chaired the committee that drafted the 1812 Constitution and died in prison in Portugal in 1829, a victim of absolutist repression. Today the street runs between Valverde and el Barco: a short, inner, traffic-free stretch, a copy of the plots the company drew over the old convent garden.

In 1810, before setting off for the Cortes of Cádiz, Muñoz Torrero donated to the militia of his native town, Cabeza del Buey, a red-and-yellow flag embroidered by his sister María Úrsula. When the constitutional regime fell in 1823, the secularised nun Sor Isidora de San Joaquín hid the standard in the convent of La Concepción in Cabeza del Buey to keep it from the absolutists, who sought to destroy it. In 1837, the flag reached the Congress of Deputies, where it was displayed from the rostrum as a symbol of national sovereignty. The biographical pamphlet that Ángel Fernández de los Ríos published in 1864 includes a facsimile of that flag.