Calle Gómez de Mora

A street dedicated to Juan Gómez de Mora, the architect who gave Madrid much of its Baroque face. Chief master of the royal works from 1610, he translated the Herreran canon into an architecture of brick, slate and spire-topped towers. A few meters away he left his major works: the Plaza Mayor, with its 477 balconies, built between 1617 and 1620; the Court Prison; and the Casa de la Villa. His career had a resounding fall: in 1637 the Count-Duke of Olivares banished him to Murcia for handing over a Titian from the royal collection and leaving a copy in its place. The street was earlier called del Conde de Barajas, after the Zapata palace. The city renamed it in 1939, in the very neighborhood where the architect worked and lived.

In 1636 Gómez de Mora handed over a Titian painting belonging to the royal collection to the licentiate Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado, placing a copy in the Alcázar. Word reached the Count-Duke of Olivares, who was already seeking a way to remove him, and it served as the formal pretext to order his exile to the kingdom of Murcia by decree of September 1636 (effective in 1637). The court’s chief architect, the man who had raised the Plaza Mayor, was sent to supervise irrigation works on a salary of 30 ducats a month.