Calle de Pérez Galdós

Barely a hundred metres separate Hortaleza from Fuencarral, and along that stretch of the Justicia district runs Calle de Pérez Galdós. Texeira’s 1656 map already drew it, and by 1769 it appears with a name: Calle del Colmillo. The bullfighter Ángel Pastor lived here; in 1882 he was badly gored with Philip’s descendant Alfonso XII watching from the stands, and for months a steady trickle of visitors came asking after him. The new name arrived in 1899. Galdós was 56 and held a seat in the Royal Academy, but this street was no random pick: in Fortunata y Jacinta the narrator names it by its old sign, Colmillo, as the place where Fortunata takes shelter. The council gave the author back a setting from his own work. Juan Antonio Cabezas relished the paradox: the most meticulous chronicler of working-class Madrid was given a minor side street. Today it is pedestrian and lives on its café terraces and tapas bars.

In chapter XI of Fortunata y Jacinta, Villalonga tells Juanito Santa Cruz that he followed Fortunata as far as Calle del Colmillo: “They called the night watchman, he let them in, they went inside. Into a house on the north pavement between the plaster figurine shop and the donkey-milk establishment.” The City Council chose precisely that street —⁠and no other, more prominent one⁠— because Galdós himself had fixed it in the novel. The tribute includes the exact address he had written.