Calle Pedro Teixeira

Pedro Teixeira Albernaz was born in Lisbon around 1595 into a family of cartographers. Around 1619 he settled in Madrid and served Philip IV as royal cosmographer and military engineer. In 1656 he published in Antwerp the Topographia de la Villa de Madrid, an enormous map engraved on twenty copper plates that, joined together, measured nearly three meters wide. He was not content with the layout of the streets: he drew the façades, the rooftops and the gardens with a detail that still lets one recognize vanished corners, such as the Corral del Príncipe on which the Teatro Español now stands. It remains the most reliable urban portrait of Habsburg Madrid. Calle de Pedro Teixeira runs among the office blocks of Cuatro Caminos, over ground that in the cartographer’s day lay far from the city.