Calle General Álvarez de Castro

The name honours Mariano Álvarez de Castro, a soldier born in 1749 who entered Spanish memory for a single word: resist. In 1809, during the Peninsular War, he was left to govern Girona when Napoleon’s army besieged it for the third time. The siege dragged on for seven months. Inside the walls, hunger and disease killed as many as the cannon, and he answered with an edict threatening death to anyone who spoke the word surrender. He held the city until he fell ill; only then did it capitulate. The French took him prisoner to the castle of Figueres, where he died in January 1810. The story soon spread that he had been poisoned, circulated as a martyr’s legend, though the cause of his death was never documented. Madrid revived his memory in the mid-19th century. Today the street links Eloy Gonzalo with José Abascal, parallel to the quiet grid of Trafalgar, far from the din of the siege that gave it its name.