Calle de Santocildes

Until 1899 this street was called calle de las Américas. The city council renamed it as part of a scheme that replaced the names of the recently lost colonies with those of soldiers fallen in the Cuban war. The one chosen was Fidel Alonso de Santocildes. Born in 1844 in Cubo de Bureba, a village in Burgos, he came from a family of soldiers. He left the Toledo Infantry Academy and spent almost his entire career in the Antilles, under the command of Martínez Campos. On 13 July 1895, by then a brigadier, he led little more than a thousand men at Peralejo against the far more numerous insurgent troops of Antonio Maceo. He took two bullets to the chest while holding the column; a third shot to the head finished him. His brigade covered the advance of the main body marching with Martínez Campos toward Bayamo. He was posthumously awarded the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand.