Calle de Pío Baroja

In the Niño Jesús neighbourhood, within the Retiro district, this street runs down from the area around the Hospital del Niño Jesús to the Calle del Doce de Octubre. The name does not stand alone: the neighbouring streets honour the Generation of '98, and the Calle de Ángel Ganivet runs close by. The writer who gives it its name came to literature from medicine. Pío Baroja studied medicine at the Central University of Madrid and practised for a short while in Cestona, in Guipúzcoa, before trading the scalpel for the pen. He knew the poor neighbourhoods of southern Madrid, and from them he built the trilogy La lucha por la vida (1904-1905), which set his literary portrait. Among his major works stand out El árbol de la ciencia and Zalacaín el aventurero. From 1939 until his death he lived at Ruiz de Alarcón 12, a few steps from the Retiro. The city was slow to settle the debt: the council named him Adopted Son posthumously on 25 October 2022, with the unanimous vote of every group.