Calle de Murcia

The street begins at the paseo de Santa María de la Cabeza, crosses the paseo de las Delicias and ends near Atocha station, at the northern tip of a neighborhood that grew up against the tracks. It takes its name from Murcia, the city and old garden country of the southeast, in an area where the streets filled with the names of Spanish cities in the shadow of the Delicias and Mediodía stations. The exact reason for this street was never recorded; it fits the pattern, but what is documented is the layout, not the motive. What came later left its mark. On the corner with the paseo de las Delicias the Hotel Carlton opened in 1959, its curved façade dressed by the ceramist Santiago Padrós with a mosaic of Spain’s great monumental cities. Murcia looks out, from its sign, at the tracks that once brought it here.