Paseo de Felipe V

Philip V, the first Bourbon on the Spanish throne, was the last king to sleep in the old Alcázar, the pile that burned on Christmas 1734. On its ashes he ordered the present Royal Palace raised, which he would not see finished. He reigned forty-five years, a record in Spanish history, with one interruption: in 1724 he abdicated in favour of his son Louis I, and when the boy died of smallpox he had to return to the throne. The Paseo de Felipe V runs between calle de Arrieta and the plaza de Oriente. It is hard to imagine that this open corner was once a tangle of medieval lanes now wiped from the map. Joseph Bonaparte sent in the first picks around 1811 to clear the Alcázar’s eastern flank, and the works on the Teatro Real finished ordering the plot. From that reform were born several streets with Bourbon and military names; the 1848 map fixed the list. After 1868, the council renamed the street calle de Sorolla, after the Valencian weaver of the Germanías revolt, but the name did not take and the street returned to its Bourbon designation.

The castrato Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, lived at the court of Philip V for twenty-five years. Tradition held that Isabella Farnese hired him in 1737 to cure the king’s melancholy with his voice. The musicologist Daniel Martín Sáez has shown that there is no contemporary source supporting that therapeutic narrative: Farinelli came as a chamber musician by political decision, not as a healer, and the tale of the prostrate king who responded only to the castrato’s singing was constructed in the eighteenth century by English writers and historians to criticize the Spanish crown. What is documented is that Farinelli remained in Spain until the death of Ferdinand VI in 1759 and that Philip V, in his final years, suffered a serious mental and physical decline.