Calle de Trafalgar

The name evokes the naval battle fought off Cape Trafalgar, on the Cádiz coast, on 21 October 1805. There the combined French and Spanish fleet was beaten by Nelson’s British ships, with Nelson himself mortally wounded in the midst of victory. The defeat sank Spanish naval hopes for a generation, and Benito Pérez Galdós turned it into literature: Trafalgar opens his series of Episodios nacionales. The calle de Trafalgar was laid out around the 1880s, when the expansion of Chamberí was turning market gardens into blocks of housing. It links the calle de Luchana with the calle de Eloy Gonzalo and gives its name to the whole neighborhood around it. Along its course stood, for decades, the Olavide market, demolished with a controlled blast in 1974. Where it once was there is now a landscaped square and quiet café terraces.