Calle del General Palanca

Until 1924 this street had no name of its own: it appeared as calle Particular, one of many that Arganzuela’s growth was opening between the paseo de Santa María de la Cabeza and the paseo de las Delicias. That year the council dedicated it to a soldier who had died half a century before. Carlos Palanca Gutiérrez was born in Valencia in 1819 and enlisted in Málaga in 1839. He served in the First Carlist War and spent long spells in the Philippines, but his name stayed tied to Southeast Asia: in the Franco-Spanish intervention in Cochinchina he commanded the Spanish contingent and acted as minister plenipotentiary. In 1862 he signed, on behalf of Spain, the Treaty of Saigon that closed that campaign, in the south of present-day Vietnam. Afterward came Puerto Rico, Cuba in the midst of the Ten Years' War, and the captaincy general of the Canary Islands. He reached the rank of field marshal, retired to Palma de Mallorca and died in Madrid in 1876.