Calle del Marqués de Leganés

Malasaña·Universidad

The name honours the noble title of the 1st Marquess of Leganés, Diego Mexía Felípez de Guzmán (Madrid, 1582 – Milan, 1655), a soldier and statesman under Philip IV who governed the Duchy of Milan and presided over the councils of Flanders and Italy. The 1894 naming is explained not by the man himself⁠—⁠dead almost two centuries earlier⁠—⁠but by the adjoining building: the Altamira palace, whose eighteenth- and nineteenth-century owner counted the marquessate of Leganés among his titles. The street runs precisely along the rear façade of that palace, between calle de los Libreros and calle de San Bernardo.

Calle del Marqués de Leganés skirts a block in the Universidad district where the Altamira palace stands, designed by Ventura Rodríguez in 1772 with four façades. Only the wing facing Flor Alta was ever built; the rest stayed on paper. Before that palace, the block already had an illustrious owner. In the seventeenth century Diego Mexía Felípez de Guzmán lived here, 1st Marquess of Leganés and cousin of the Count-Duke of Olivares. His passion was painting: he gathered more than thirteen hundred works, and Rubens considered him one of the world’s greatest connoisseurs. The title eventually passed to the House of Altamira, owners of the palace. When the city council organised the street register in 1894, the street was named after that title. Earlier it had answered to a humbler one, calle de Aguadores. Today the old palace is the seat of the European Institute of Design.

Its names

  • Sin nombre registrado1656
  • Calle de la Cueva1769 - c. 1880
  • Calle de Aguadoresc. 1880 - 1894
  • Calle del Marqués de Leganés31 enero 1894 - actualidad
Sources (10)

Crossings