Calle de Raimundo Fernández Villaverde

The name recalls Raimundo Fernández Villaverde, born in Madrid in 1848, who rose to the very top of Restoration politics. He held several ministries and, above all, that of Finance, a post he occupied as Spain emerged battered from the colonial disaster of 1898. His laws of 1899 and 1900 put in order accounts ruined by the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and that tax reform remained his most remembered work. The street was not born with his name. It was a stretch of the old Paseo de Ronda, the city’s second ring road, and in 1917 the city council divided it among several honorees. It runs west to east, from the Glorieta de Cuatro Caminos to the Paseo de la Castellana, and marks the border between Chamberí to the south and Tetuán to the north. In the early 20th century it was the longest street in Cuatro Caminos, over a kilometer. The slope of the ground forced three streets branching north to begin, quite literally, with steps.