Calle de Pelayo

Calle de Pelayo runs down to Calle de San Marcos, in the Justicia district. At its northern end stands the Longoria Palace, the Modernist headquarters of the SGAE that José Grases Riera built in the early twentieth century. It was once called San Antón, after an old lazaretto where plague victims were isolated, later turned into a hospital. In the mid-nineteenth century the council weeded duplicate names from the street map and brought in the Asturian warlord. Capmany told a homelier version, about an affair between an innkeeper and a young man named Pelayo, but it was dropped for lack of evidence. In the late twentieth century the street took on another meaning. Chueca, then cheap and run-down, gradually took in the LGBT community, and Pelayo became the most visible axis of that presence: the high-heels race and the Mr. Gay Pride contest are held here during Pride. A name that began as a medieval warrior ended up attached to the most visible street celebration of the LGBT rights movement in Spain.