Calle de Requena

Ópera·Palacio

The name honours the Valencian city of Requena for its defence of the Isabelline cause during the First Carlist War. On 13 September 1836 a Carlist column of some 14,000 infantry under General Gómez laid siege to the town. Colonel José Ruiz de Albornoz rejected the demand to surrender. The Carlists withdrew without a fight. Ten days later, on 23 September 1836, the Gaceta de Madrid granted Requena the title of Very Noble and Very Loyal City and the right to adopt a new coat of arms —⁠the so-called liberal one. The Madrid street remained as a lasting recognition of that gesture.

Calle de Requena runs between Calle de Lepanto and Calle de Bailén, hard against the gardens of the Royal Palace. It stands on the site of two vanished royal buildings: the Casa del Tesoro and the Royal Library. In the Casa del Tesoro, Diego de Velázquez lived from 1652 until his death in 1660, the very years he was painting Las Meninas. Beneath the cobbles lies one of the puzzles of medieval Madrid’s defensive layout. At numbers 3 and 5, building works brought to light a stretch of masonry that some historians attribute to the 12th-century Christian wall and others to the 9th-century Arab wall. The wall still has no agreed date. The name came after 1836, when Requena proved stubbornly Isabelline against the Carlists. The naming belongs to a batch with which the Madrid of Isabella II turned its street map into a map of loyalties, alongside Lepanto and Bailén.

Its names

  • Sin denominación propia (solar de la Casa del Tesoro y Biblioteca Real)hasta c. 1810
  • Apertura del viario (sin nombre consolidado)c. 1810–1836
  • Calle de Requenafrom 1836
Sources (9)

Crossings