Calle de Fuencarral

Before it was a street, it was a road. Since the Middle Ages it linked the heart of Madrid with Fuencarral, a village recorded in documents from 1208. Texeira’s map (1656) lists it as road or street: below it was urban, above it still a path through open country. Philip IV’s wall cut it in 1625 at today’s calle del Divino Pastor, with the Puerta de los Pozos de la Nieve, later the Puerta de Fuencarral. At number 78 stands the Royal Hospice of San Fernando, built by Pedro de Ribera between 1722 and 1726; its Churrigueresque doorway is the street’s finest monument and now houses the Museum of the History of Madrid. The street carried a crime that shook the country: in 1888 the widow Luciana Borcino was found strangled at number 109, and the maid Higinia Balaguer was garrotted in 1890 before twenty thousand onlookers. Galdós recounted it in The Crime of Calle de Fuencarral. When the municipality of Fuencarral joined Madrid in 1950, the oddity of a street named after a still-independent town came to an end.

On 1 July 1888, Luciana Borcino was found strangled at number 109. The maid Higinia Balaguer was convicted and executed by garrote on 19 July 1890 before some twenty thousand people around the prison. Benito Pérez Galdós covered the trial for the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa and left six chronicles that portray the media manufacture of guilt before the verdict was known.