Pasaje de Tony Leblanc

Between calle de la Beneficencia and calle de San Mateo, in the Justicia neighbourhood, there is a short passage that for decades had no official name: the register listed it as a lane dependent on calle de la Beneficencia. Today it bears the name of one of the great comic actors of Spanish cinema. Tony Leblanc was born in Madrid in 1922, son of the Prado Museum’s caretaker, and the family lived in a service flat attached to the museum itself. He made his debut in 1940 at the Teatro de la Zarzuela and became an indispensable figure of musical revue. He won two Goya awards and the Gold Medal of Labour, and died in 2012. The idea of giving him a street came from director Santiago Segura, who launched a petition in 2021; the Centro district council approved it unanimously and the plaque was unveiled on 28 October 2022. The corner was chosen for the theatrical memory of the place: a few metres away still stands the Teatro Lara, one of the stages where Leblanc made his name.

The passage entered the official street register under a name before the City Council ever christened it. In July 1999, Modesto Martínez used silicone to stick up a mock municipal plaque bearing his own name during a neighbors' farewell party. The plaque survived a decade without anyone removing it: it appeared in official bulletins, on Google Maps cartography, and in redevelopment plans for the Barceló area. The author of the prank died six weeks after the Plenary approved replacing his name with that of Tony Leblanc. The actor’s son thanked them for the tribute, noting that his father had lived “more passages than the story of Don Quixote”.