Paseo República de Cuba

When the state handed the Retiro over to the municipality of Madrid in 1868, after the Glorious Revolution, the old royal garden began to open to the city and to weave within its limits a web of walks. In the late nineteenth century those walks took on the names of Latin American republics, with the decisive push of the Hispano-American Social and Economic Congress that Madrid hosted in 1900. No record survives of the exact date this street adopted the name of Cuba; the traces point to the years from 1900 to 1902. The Paseo de la República de Cuba runs through the park from south to north. It begins at the Glorieta del Ángel Caído and ends at the Plaza de Honduras, where the Fuente de la Alcachofa flows. At number 4 stands the Palacio de Cristal, raised between 1886 and 1887 by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco as a pavilion for the General Exhibition of the Philippines; queen regent María Cristina inaugurated it in 1887, and today it serves as a hall of the Reina Sofía Museum. The famous Monument to Cuba is not on this street but in the Plaza del Salvador. It was inaugurated in 1952, on the 460th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival on the island. Several hands worked on it: Mariano Benlliure directed the whole, Miguel Blay shaped the allegory of Cuba, Francisco Asorey sculpted Christopher Columbus, and Juan Cristóbal, Isabella I of Castile.