Gran Vía de San Francisco

Gran Vía de San Francisco runs straight down from the Puerta de Toledo to the square named after the basilica of San Francisco el Grande, which crowns it to the south. But before it existed as an avenue, it was a whole quarter that had to be demolished. The scheme that was built was drawn by Secundino Zuazo in 1932. To open the way he proposed razing the San Francisco quarter, a dense fabric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the planning of the day judged cheaper to knock down than to repair. The tally is staggering: 103 properties, 1,811 dwellings and nearly 11,000 residents wiped off the map. Demolition began in April 1936, and weeks later the Civil War froze everything. The avenue did not open to traffic until Franco presided over the ceremony on 18 July 1961. One flaw remains, still felt underfoot: an error in the road level raised a hump that locals christened “the hunchback,” which blocks a clear view of the basilica from the Puerta de Toledo. Levelling it was deemed unaffordable, and the hump stayed.