Calle de Pedro Muñoz Seca

Before it honored a playwright, this street went through two political renamings. It opened as Calle del Veintidós de Junio, after the 1866 uprising at the San Gil artillery barracks that signaled the end of Isabella II’s reign. It later became Calle de la Concordia and, in 1910, was dedicated to José Mejía Lequerica, a Quito-born deputy who defended colonial America in the Cortes of Cádiz. In 1941 the name passed to a resident of the street itself. Pedro Muñoz Seca had reached Madrid around 1904 and, from a civil-service post at the Ministry of Public Works, sustained an overflowing career in theater. He invented the astracán, a comic genre built on puns and the grotesque distortion of situations. His La venganza de don Mendo, a verse parody of historical drama premiered in 1918, remains one of the most performed works in Spanish theater. Arrested in Barcelona in July 1936, he was executed at Paracuellos del Jarama that November.