Calle de Vergara

Calle de Vergara is a short, pedestrian, cobbled street linking Plaza de Isabel II with Plaza de Ramales, in the heart of the Habsburg quarter. Its layout was born from emptiness: Joseph Bonaparte had the old Santiago quarter, beside the Alcázar, razed, and on that cleared ground the houses were later arranged around the Teatro Real. The opera house rules the area. It opened in 1850 and still keeps a hall named Salón Vergara, a nod to the neighbouring street. The name comes from war: when the First Carlist War ended, Isabella II’s liberalism rewrote the street map with the victory still fresh. In the fields of that Basque town, on 31 August 1839, Espartero and Maroto embraced in a gesture that sealed the war’s end in the north. Whoever walks slowly to the corner with la Unión will find a plaque devoted to the Puerta de Valnadú, one of the four gates of walled medieval Madrid, until Philip II ordered the wall pulled down in 1567.