Paseo del Marqués de Pontejos

The Paseo del Marqués de Pontejos runs through the southwest sector of the Retiro Park, in the Jerónimos neighborhood. Here stood the old Jardín de San Pablo, land of the Buen Retiro Palace that passed to the Madrid city council in 1868, after the Glorious Revolution. Joaquín Vizcaíno, corregidor of Madrid from 1834, arrived after ten years of exile forced on him by Ferdinand VII’s absolutist restoration. Once at the head of the city, he divided it into five districts and fifty neighborhoods, ordered the houses numbered starting from the Puerta del Sol, brought street lighting to the main axes, and set up refuse collection. He held the title of widowed marquis of Pontejos after the death of the 4th marchioness, the title that explains the walk’s name. His mark went beyond urban planning. Under his impulse the Madrid Savings Bank and Monte de Piedad was born, opened to the public in 1839, and he promoted the San Bernardino Asylum and the city’s first infant schools. In 1892, in gratitude, the Savings Bank itself raised him a statue in the Plaza de las Descalzas.

In 1817 Joaquín Vizcaíno married the 4th Marchioness of Casa Pontejos, María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, who was twenty-eight years his senior and had already been widowed twice. The marchioness was painted by Francisco de Goya around 1786 —⁠not in an equestrian portrait, but standing in a garden, in a shepherdess’s dress with a small dog at her feet⁠— in the work now held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Vizcaíno was widowed in 1834, the same year he was named corregidor of Madrid, and from then on he always went by the title of ‘widowed marquis’, the one still borne by the promenade and the street Madrid dedicated to him.