Calle del Marqués de Casa Riera

The marquisate was created in 1834 by the regent queen María Cristina, who granted it to the deputy Tomás Felipe Riera. The title later passed to his nephew, Alejandro de Mora y Riera. It was Mora who built on Calle de Alcalá a palace famous for its garden, about which legends still circulate: it is said he kept it firmly shut, because its owner lived in Paris and rarely set foot in Madrid. From 1917 part of that garden was dismantled to make way for Antonio Palacios’s Círculo de Bellas Artes, and the street opened then inherited the aristocrat’s title. Nothing remained of the palace: it was demolished in the 1930s.