Paseo de Damas

In the Campo del Moro gardens, the twenty hectares that descend west of the Royal Palace, there is a path that refuses to bend. It is the Paseo de Damas, the axis that runs the grounds from north to south. Its straightness holds a story. In 1844 Narciso Pascual y Colomer drew for these lands a scheme of parallel and perpendicular avenues. The revolution of 1868 halted the work, and when the regent Maria Christina of Habsburg resumed it in 1890, she commissioned from the gardener Ramón Oliva a different park, of curving paths and gentle slopes. The whole garden undulated; only the Paseo de Damas kept the straight line traced half a century earlier. Along that axis are spread the most notable pieces: the Campo del Moro Vase, the Fountain of the Shells and, at the far end, the Queen’s Little Chalet, a Tyrolean-style pavilion that Enrique Repullés raised in 1898. There Maria Christina took tea with the court ladies who strolled the grounds, and from them comes the name.

Enrique Repullés Segarra, chief architect of the Palace, designed the Chalecito de la Reina at the end of the promenade because María Cristina of Habsburg, who had spent her summers in the Austrian Tyrol, wanted a space that reminded her of the mountain houses of her native country. The pavilion, with its very steep roof and timber structure, served during the Regency as the setting for the afternoon teas the queen offered to the European ladies and nobles who visited her in Madrid: they would walk along the Paseo de Damas and end up taking tea in the Tyrolean chalet, two hundred meters from the Royal Palace.