Calle del Doctor Esquerdo

The street reuses an earlier layout. When Carlos María de Castro planned the Ensanche of Madrid in 1860, he drew a second ring closing off the new district and separating it from the empty land beyond: the Paseo de Ronda. The modern street still follows that line. The doctor who ended up giving it its name, José María Esquerdo y Zaragoza, opened the Esquerdo Sanatorium in Carabanchel Alto on 20 May 1877, an institution that broke with the confinement typical of the age: he removed the mechanical restraints and built his patients' days around work, theatre and physical exercise, an occupational therapy ahead of its time. He also had an intense political life on the Republican side, and in 1910 he was elected deputy for Madrid on the same ticket as Pérez Galdós and Pablo Iglesias. There is a detail worth imagining as you walk here: the street gathered the institutions that carried on his charitable work, among them the wards of the Hospital de San Juan de Dios, now turned into the Hospital Gregorio Marañón.