Calle de Sánchez Bustillo

A pedestrian passage barely ninety-nine metres long brushes the side of the Reina Sofía Museum, where the old General Hospital of Atocha once stood. The calle de Sánchez Bustillo joins calle del Doctor Drumen with calle del Doctor Mata, and from that company alone you can guess what the neighbourhood was about: doctors, doctors and more doctors. In the late 19th century the city council handed out the local streets among the physicians tied to the hospital. Here is the twist a tourist would tell with a laugh: of all those white-coated neighbours, he was the only one with nothing to do with medicine. Cayetano Sánchez Bustillo was a man of figures. He entered the Treasury at fifteen as a plain clerk and became the country’s foremost fiscal authority, so respected that even the First Republic kept him in office despite his being an enemy of the regime. He was Minister for Overseas Territories and of Finance, Governor of the Bank of Spain, and Mayor of Madrid for just over a month in 1890. Beside this little street there was once a square that also bore his surname, until it was renamed plaza de Juan Goytisolo in 2018. The financier lost the square but keeps the alley that closes off the front of the museum. Not bad for someone who reached the street by trade-guild mistake.