Calle de Ríos Rosas

The name sounds like a landscape, but it recalls a man. Antonio de los Ríos Rosas (Ronda, 1812 – Madrid, 1873) was one of the great orators of the 19th-century Spanish Parliament, a deputy, interior minister, and three times president of the Congress of Deputies. Madrid dedicated this street to him in 1880, as Chamberí grew northward and needed to name its new streets. Residents soon shortened it: for decades they knew it as “Riorosas,” running the surnames together until the border between them vanished. It runs from the Plaza de Juan de Zorrilla to the Plaza de San Juan de la Cruz, crossing three neighborhoods of Chamberí, one of which bears its very name. Along its pavements stands the School of Mines, from the late 19th century, with its brick façade and its cabinet of geological specimens. And beneath the asphalt, on October 17, 1919, the Ríos Rosas metro station opened, on the first line Madrid ever had.