Calle de San Leopoldo
Bears the name of Saint Leopold, twelfth-century Margrave of Austria and patron of Vienna, though no record survives of why it was chosen for this street in Almenara.
Leopold III of Austria, margrave of the House of Babenberg, ruled the Austrian march for four decades until his death in 1136. He turned down the crown of the Holy Roman Empire that was offered to him and chose to stay on his own lands, where he built abbeys. Canonised in 1485, he is patron of Austria and of Vienna, and rests in the abbey of Klosterneuburg that he himself founded on the banks of the Danube.
Why Madrid brought this Central European margrave to a northern neighbourhood has not been preserved. The street belongs to Almenara, in Tetuán, a district that grew in the late nineteenth century beside the old road to France, today Bravo Murillo. The saint’s name passed from the sign to the place itself: at number 8, a food arcade opened in 1973 that was reborn in 2023 as the Mercado de San Leopoldo, a step from plaza de Castilla and its leaning towers.