Paseo de la Ciudad de Plasencia

The promenade runs along the edge of Madrid’s western ridge, where the Royal Palace hill drops toward the Manzanares. It is barely fit for traffic: it works as a boundary, splitting the Parque de Atenas in two between the Cuesta de la Vega and the Paseo de la Virgen del Puerto. Through the first half of the 20th century it was called Paseo de la Infanta María Teresa, after the daughter of Alfonso XII, who died in 1912 at just thirty. The infanta lived in a palace at the top of the slope, demolished in 1970; beneath the rubble came an unexpected prize: remains of Madrid’s Moorish wall. Around the creation of the Parque de Atenas in 1971, the council gave it the name of the Extremaduran city. Plasencia has with this corner a bond few suspect, through the Marquis of Vadillo, magistrate of that city before he brought to Madrid the devotion to the Virgen del Puerto. Plasencia itself was born to please: Alfonso VIII founded it in 1186, and its name comes from the motto the king carved on its coat of arms, Ut placeat Deo et hominibus, to please God and men.

The palace that gave rise to the earlier name —⁠the Palacio de la Cuesta de la Vega, residence of the Infanta María Teresa⁠— was demolished in 1970 because of its near-ruinous state after the Civil War. When it was torn down, remains of the Arab wall of Madrid appeared beneath its foundations, the same stretch that the promenade now borders on its eastern flank. The street lost the infanta’s name and gained that of Plasencia in the same decade in which the palace disappeared.