Paseo de Venezuela

An interior walk in the Retiro Park that takes the name of the South American republic, within the series of Ibero-American streets mapped on Facundo Cañada’s plan of 1900. Its formalization belongs to the Hispano-Americanist climate driven by the Ibero-American Union (founded January 25, 1885) and the Hispano-American Social and Economic Congress held in Madrid in November 1900.

The Paseo de Venezuela crosses the heart of the Retiro Park from north to south, linking the Fuente de los Galápagos with the Fuente del Ángel Caído. At number 2 stands the Palacio de Velázquez, which Ricardo Velázquez Bosco built between 1881 and 1883 for the National Mining Exhibition of 1883 and which today hosts shows of the Reina Sofía Museum. The Ría also winds along the walk, a channeled watercourse about two hundred meters long, with small waterfalls over rockwork and two rustic footbridges. The name comes from the Hispano-Americanist drive of the last years of the nineteenth century. The Ibero-American Union promoted naming public spaces with place names from the continent, and the Retiro holds the most visible result: walks bearing the names of republics such as Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay, México, Paraguay, Perú, Panamá, or Honduras. In 1975 the city council of Caracas gave Madrid a bronze bust of the Venezuelan poet Andrés Eloy Blanco, which rests beside the lake, at number 2V of the walk.

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