Calle de Villalar
Recalls the battle fought on 23 April 1521 at Villalar (Valladolid), where the troops of Charles I defeated the Comuneros of Castile. The next day the captains Juan de Padilla, Juan Bravo and Francisco Maldonado were beheaded in the village square. The street forms part of the Comunero cluster of the eastern Ensanche, alongside Padilla, Bravo and Maldonado.
Villalar is a village in the province of Valladolid, and there the fate of a whole war was decided. On 23 April 1521, the royalist army crushed the Comunero troops in a fight that barely became one: the cavalry charged before the infantry even appeared, while the Comunero artillery sank into the mud of the fallow fields without firing a single shot. The next day, Juan de Padilla, Juan Bravo and Francisco Maldonado climbed the scaffold in the village square and were beheaded. With their heads rolled the War of the Communities of Castile.
Three centuries later, Madrid chose to remember them. When Carlos María de Castro planned the eastern Ensanche in 1860, the neighborhood received many of its names. Around 1871, four neighboring streets were named as a deliberate tribute: Villalar, Padilla, Bravo and Maldonado.
The choice was no accident. These streets work as a gesture of 19th-century liberalism, which had rescued the Comunero revolt and turned it into a banner of lost freedoms.