Calle de la Reina

Barely two hundred meters, running parallel to the Gran Vía, hold more history than one would expect. The name recalls the procession of 13 December 1639, when Elisabeth of Bourbon, wife of Philip IV, presided over the moving of the Cristo de la Paciencia to the newly built Capuchin convent. It is worth pinning down the right queen: several sources confuse her with Margaret of Austria, who died in 1611, so it can only be Elisabeth. At number 8 stood the Maserano Palace, home in the early 19th century to General Abel Hugo and his nine-year-old son Victor. The same building later housed the Fonda de Genieys, the most elegant French kitchen at court, where Rossini composed his Stabat Mater in 1831. On the same street stood the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Presentación, the Niñas de Leganés, which took in orphan girls and whose founding statutes gave an unsettling preference to the prettiest, deemed most at risk. The school fell in 1911 with the opening of the Gran Vía, which was about to change everything.