Calle de Segovia

Before there was a street here there was a ravine and a stream, the San Pedro, mentioned already in the Madrid charter of 1202. That watercourse opened one of the few natural approaches to the town’s promontory, and throughout the Middle Ages served as the road to Segovia. The street that today descends more than a kilometre from Puerta Cerrada to the bridge over the Manzanares rests literally on that channelled stream. The idea of taming it began with Philip II, who dreamed of a great processional avenue from the river to the fortress. The bridge was built, redesigned by Juan de Herrera with nine ashlar arches and finished in 1584. The dreamed avenue never came: what remained was a street one could pass through. The street keeps stories in its numbers. At 23, now gardens beneath the viaduct, stood the Royal Mint, where Mariano José de Larra was born in 1809. Of the place where one of the greats of Spanish letters came into the world, nothing remains but the air under the bridge. Surviving are the fourteenth-century Mudéjar tower of San Pedro el Viejo and the Palace of the Prince of Anglona, with an inner garden that still holds on in the heart of the old town.