Calle de Téllez
The street bears the surname of Friar Gabriel Téllez (baptized in Madrid on 29 March 1579, died in Almazán in 1648), the Mercedarian friar who signed his plays under the pen name Tirso de Molina. The street opened along with the Pacífico district between 1878 and 1885, part of a southern expansion of Madrid whose streets took the names of Spanish writers and artists. No accessible primary source explicitly records which Téllez the street honors; the attribution rests on the neighborhood’s naming pattern (Narciso Serra, Julián Gayarre, Antonio de Nebrija) and on the absence of any other verifiably notable Téllez in the Madrid of the time.
Calle de Téllez, in the heart of the Pacífico district, bears the name of one of the giants of the Golden Age, hidden behind a surname few can decode.
The neighborhood was laid out between 1875 and 1885 south of the Retiro, following the railway lines running into Atocha. Those who named it drew almost always on Spanish letters and arts: nearby run the streets of the tenor Julián Gayarre and the humanist Antonio de Nebrija. Téllez was born of that same logic, pointing to Friar Gabriel Téllez, the Mercedarian friar who signed his work as Tirso de Molina and wrote The Trickster of Seville.
Curiously, when the street opened no Madrid street was yet called Tirso de Molina; the nearby square was the Plaza del Progreso and did not change its name until 1939. No document expressly ties this street to the author of The Trickster, but the neighborhood’s literary air and the lack of any other notable Téllez in the Madrid of that era point to him. Those who stroll here carry, without knowing it, the surname of the man who invented Don Juan.