Calle de Fuencarral

Chueca·Justicia

The street takes its name from the old town of Fuencarral, an independent municipality north of Madrid until 1950. The place name comes from a spring in a spot called “la Carra,” where carters heading north stopped to water their animals. The original form, “Fuente Carra,” evolved into Fuencarral. The town’s spring, on the old road to Alcobendas, is the landmark that named the village and, by extension, the road leading to it.

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.

Its names

  • Camino o calle de FuencarralAntes de 1656 (documentado en plano Texeira, 1656)
  • Calle de la Mala de Francia (tramo norte)Siglos 18th-19th
  • Calle de FuencarralNombre consolidado from the 17th century, vigente hasta hoy
Sources (10)

Crossings