Calle del Duque de Rivas

Embajadores

The street is named after Ángel de Saavedra y Ramírez de Baquedano (Córdoba, 1791 – Madrid, 1865), 3rd Duke of Rivas, for the palace that was his Madrid residence, later known as the Palacio de Viana. The name is posthumous: until 1890 the space was not a street but a small cove-like square known as the plaza de la Concepción Jerónima, closed off by the Hieronymite convent founded in 1509 by Beatriz Galindo. After the convent was demolished in 1890, Madrid’s city council resolved on 26 June 1895 to name the new street after the duke.

This barely hundred-metre street, in the Embajadores district, honours Ángel de Saavedra, 3rd Duke of Rivas, the towering figure of Spanish Romanticism. Its shortness has old roots: for almost four hundred years the convent of the Concepción Jerónima stood here, founded in 1509 by Beatriz Galindo “la Latina.” When it was emptied under the disentailment, the plot was split between the street and the garden of the Palacio de Viana, which also faces the street. Saavedra led a novelistic life: wounded at the battle of Chiclana in 1811, sentenced to death in 1823 for backing Riego’s uprising, eleven years of exile, and a return with the 1833 amnesty, the same year he inherited the dukedom. In his palace he held literary gatherings, and from its rooms came El moro expósito (1834) and Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835).

Its names

  • Plaza de la Concepción JerónimaAnterior a 1890
  • Vía sin nombre (calle abierta)1890–1895
  • Calle del Duque de RivasDesde el 26 de junio de 1895
Sources (9)

Crossings