Calle de Velázquez
Bears the name of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (Seville, 1599 – Madrid, 1660), court painter to Philip IV and author of Las Meninas. Madrid’s City Council named it so as it developed the Salamanca Ensanche to the Castro Plan of 1860, following the logic of honoring the great figures of the arts and letters in the new bourgeois neighborhood.
Velázquez came to court in 1623, summoned by the Count-Duke of Olivares. That same year he portrayed Philip IV and gained the post of court painter. In 1652 the king named him palace chamberlain, an office that placed the royal spaces and ceremonies in his hands. He died in Madrid in 1660.
The name arrived with the street. When Carlos María de Castro’s Ensanche Plan, approved in 1860, opened this sector of stately homes under the drive of the developer José de Salamanca y Mayol, the street was laid out parallel to Serrano to give structure to the new neighborhood, and it was born already bearing the painter’s name.
Before the houses, the ground had another life. The western flank, between Villanueva and Goya, was the land of the Campos Elíseos, 19th-century pleasure gardens. There a bullring rose, demolished in 1881, and an inn with its own bakery known as San José.