Calle del Marqués de la Ensenada

The street runs straight and short from Bárbara de Braganza down to Génova, in the Justicia district. It was born late: neither Texeira in 1656 nor Espinosa in 1769 draws a street here, where there were only gardens and the back of the Salesas Reales convent. The man who gives it his name governed Spain almost single-handedly. Zenón de Somodevilla, marquis of la Ensenada from 1736, gathered in his hands the secretariats of Treasury, War, Navy and the Indies, and drove the Canal de Castilla and the Catastro de Ensenada, still one of the most-read sources of the Ancien Régime. But his record holds a dark chapter: in 1749 he coordinated the Great Round-up, the general imprisonment of Roma that detained thousands of people at once with the aim of making the group vanish. The plan failed, and the last releases did not come until 1765. The street keeps memories of applause and of fire. At number 8 the Teatro Lírico opened in 1902, destroyed by a fire in 1920. And this stretch was, for much of the 20th century, the city’s French cultural axis: the Institut français opened here in 1913, and the Lycée français too.

The premiere of Ruperto Chapí’s Circe at the Teatro Lírico (7 May 1902, number 8 of this street) was the first serious attempt to create a Spanish national opera with a libretto drawn from classical mythology. The company had promised that the theater would be Madrid’s leading lyric house. Three years later the venue was renamed the Gran Teatro; in 1920 it burned down. The building that replaced it now houses the headquarters of the General Council of the Judiciary.