Calle de Serrano Jover

Calle de Serrano Jover is short, broad, and busy. It closes off to the north what was the Conde Duque Barracks, in the Universidad district, steps from the Argüelles metro. Its course follows the patrol road that ran along Philip IV’s wall, the rampart of 1625 raised to collect taxes rather than to defend the city. At the junction of today’s Amaniel and Conde Duque opened the Conde Duque gate. It was torn down in 1868, but the path lived on as Ronda del Conde Duque until 1944. That year the Franco regime named the street after Alfredo Serrano Jover, a lawyer and conservative politician who was mayor of Madrid for exactly five days in December 1921: the council elected him on the 26th and he lost re-election on the 30th by a single vote. In that brief week he still pushed forward work on the Metro. He was executed in El Pardo in 1936, at the outbreak of the Civil War. The name later appeared on the list of Franco-era streets the city proposed to rename between 2015 and 2017, but a judge halted the move and the sign remained.