Plaza de Carlos Cambronero

A small, steeply sloping square, opened where an orchard once stood. For centuries the plot belonged to the Benedictine convent of San Plácido; the council declared part of the complex a ruin in 1908 and demolished it, and the resulting gap was laid out as a square. Carlos Cambronero was an archivist, librarian and official Chronicler of the City. He reorganised the Municipal Library, opened it to the public and tripled its holdings, but his most lasting work was Las calles de Madrid (1889), written with Hilario Peñasco: over five hundred pages tracing the origin of each street with archival rigour, inventing no legends and hiding no gaps. A year after his death, in 1914, the council dedicated this modest square to him. The detail has its charm: the man who documented the names of Madrid’s streets ended up honoured at a corner where two streets he himself had researched meet — Calle del Pez and Calle del Molino de Viento.

On publishing Isabel II, íntima (1908), Cambronero received the praise of Benito Pérez Galdós, who, according to accounts of the time, regretted not having known sooner the portrait Cambronero drew of the queen. That the chronicler of the streets was also the intimate biographer of Isabel II, and that both works received public recognition during the author’s lifetime, reinforces the singularity of his figure in the Madrid of the Restoration.