Calle del Río

Downhill, almost sliding from the Senate toward Calle de Bailén, Calle del Río covers barely 189 meters between Calle de Leganitos and Bailén. The ground falls so sharply that the last stretch is bridged by a stairway: that drop is the trace of the old ravine of the Leganitos stream, the feature that explains the name and almost everything else. Even before Philip II’s wall, the street already existed as a path. On the Texeira map it appears as vistillas del río (little views of the river): it was the most direct shortcut from the walled town down to the Manzanares. A tourist coming down the stairway today treads, unknowingly, the old path to the river. This slope belonged to the convent of San Martín until Philip II took it over to keep private houses away from the Alcázar. The name Calle del Río was fixed in 1835, amid the wave of renamings after the death of Ferdinand VII; at that same moment Calle Nueva de Palacio became Bailén.

The flight of steps that bridges the drop between this street and Calle de Bailén was commissioned by the Duke of El Parque when he built the street’s first houses. It skirts the corner of what was the Casa de la Regalada —⁠Sabatini’s Royal Stables, where the horses given as gifts to the Crown were kept⁠—⁠, and it still stands today as the only physical vestige of that particular eighteenth-century intervention in an urban fabric that has changed everything else around it.