Calle de San Lorenzo

When Mesonero Romanos catalogued these lanes on his walk through old Madrid, he wrote that they offered nothing worth special mention. Few residents can boast a certificate of modesty signed by the city’s chronicler. Calle de San Lorenzo links San Mateo with Hortaleza, in the Justicia neighbourhood, and runs a mere 162 metres; it already appears under this name on Texeira’s 1656 map. Beneath that unassuming surface more history piles up than one would expect. The mansion at number 11 housed the Society of Spanish Authors, forerunner of today’s SGAE. Number 15 gathers nearly a century of Spanish tensions: a liberal school, stormed by Falangist militias, a prison of the Military Intelligence Service during the war, and later a Falange office. Number 18, the oldest, was an inn where the stagecoaches stopped. Galdós walked this street through the pages of El amigo manso, and Emilia Pardo Bazán carried it into La sirena negra. Not bad for a handful of metres the official chronicler dismissed without a word of praise.