Calle de San Eugenio

In the heart of the Embajadores district, this street runs down between Atocha and Santa Isabel along the same course drawn by 16th-century Madrid. Before it was a street it was open country beyond the walls: Cardinal Quiroga’s estate, over which the General Hospital would later grow. The saint behind the name hides two figures mistaken for one. For centuries devotion turned to a 1st-century Saint Eugene, martyr and first bishop of Toledo, beheaded in Gaul; we now know he never existed, that a 9th-century monk invented his life to justify bones already resting at Saint-Denis. The real Eugene is another man, the Visigothic archbishop who died in 657, poet and theologian. Philip II brought the legendary saint’s relics to Toledo in 1565, and from that confusion the street’s name emerged. Here unfolds one of the juiciest disputes in Madrid’s literary history. Legend says that around 1609 Juan de la Cuesta’s printing press moved to number 7, at the corner with Santa Isabel, and that from its presses came the second part of Don Quixote in 1615. A marble plaque has fixed this in stone since 1905. Recent Cervantes scholars deny it: all the records place the press on Atocha. The plaque remains. The debate, unsettled.