Calle de Toledo

Calle de Toledo begins at the Plaza Mayor and drops more than a kilometre south, crossing Embajadores and La Latina, until it ends at the Glorieta de las Pirámides, steps from the Manzanares. Before Madrid dreamed of being a court, this slope already ran down as the simple road to Toledo, and from its destination it took its name. Each time Philip II and Philip IV raised new walls, the Puerta de Toledo travelled further south, but the street kept the name. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it took the face we still know, with the Jesuits' Imperial College and the Royal Collegiate Church of San Isidro, which came to guard the remains of Madrid’s patron saint. Mesonero Romanos called it the most populous and lively in the capital, with some four thousand souls among inns, taverns, and humble workshops: the southern gate through which goods, livestock, and travellers entered. Pedro de Répide crowned it with a nickname that stuck, the people’s Gran Vía. At the southern end waits the Puerta de Toledo, a neoclassical triumphal arch built between 1813 and 1827, whose dedication was a political seesaw: born for Joseph Bonaparte, it ended up honouring Ferdinand VII. Galdós adopted the street as a fixed setting for his Madrid on paper, and swore there was none more beautiful or picturesque in all the world.