Calle del Marqués de Urquijo

Before it carried his marquess’s title, this slope was called Cuesta de Areneros, after the sand carters who climbed it laden with sand dug from the Manzanares. When Argüelles grew into a middle-class district in the last third of the 19th century, the old slope was built up and renamed to honor Estanislao de Urquijo y Landaluce. Urquijo was born in 1816 in a hamlet of the Tierra de Ayala, into a family of Álava farmers. He came to Madrid as a boy and started out selling cloth in a shop on Calle de Toledo. He went to work for the Rothschilds' agent in Spain and ended up as his right hand. From nothing he built a fortune that placed him among the richest bankers in the country. In 1883 he was mayor of Madrid for barely six months. Decades later, the street’s addresses saw memorable residents pass through: Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León lived here between 1931 and 1936, and on these pavements lived and died Anita Delgado, the woman from Málaga who became Maharani of Kapurthala.