Plaza de Chueca

When Mesonero Romanos published his tour of Madrid’s streets in 1861, this square did not yet appear on any map. The site was occupied by La Galera, a women’s prison since 1818, and the gardens of the Dukes of Frías. The square was born of an urban rearrangement and took its name from an image of Saint Gregory the Great that adorned the estate of the Marquesses of Minaya. In 1943 the city council renamed it in honour of Federico Chueca, born in 1846 in the Torre de los Lujanes. His life turned on an imprisonment: arrested on the Night of San Daniel in 1865, he composed a set of waltzes from memory in prison, drawing the piano keys on the table. Barbieri orchestrated them and Chueca left medicine for good. With La Gran Vía (1886) and Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente (1897) he signed the peaks of the género chico. The square is small, but popular speech stretched the name to cover the whole area. Since the 1990s the LGBTIQ+ community has revitalised the district, and the square became the symbolic heart of Madrid’s Pride.

Two weeks after the premiere of La Gran Vía at the Teatro Felipe (2 July 1886), some pickpockets stole Chueca’s wallet on the Este tram. The composer reported it to the press. On discovering from a photograph who the owner was, the thieves returned the wallet with the three banknotes intact and five extra duros “as a token of respect and admiration”, together with a letter signed by “El rata primero, El rata segundo y El rata tercero”, with the approval of “la Chata, la Pelos y la de Lavapiés”. In the letter they asked only to keep his portrait as a memento for their academy. The anecdote circulated widely in the Madrid press of the time and was reproduced in several twentieth-century sources; its original archival documentation has not been located in the sources consulted for this entry.