Calle de San Marcos

Calle de San Marcos crosses the Justicia neighbourhood, deep in Chueca, and already appears under this very name on the map Pedro de Texeira drew in 1656. Nearly four centuries with the same name, and the name arose long before the battle many attribute it to. The story goes that the toponym celebrates Philip V’s victory at Almansa on 25 April 1707, Saint Mark’s day. The date fits, but the street was already called this: it came from a hermitage raised in 1632 beside the Benedictine monastery of San Martín. What did come out of that day was the new church, commissioned by the king in thanksgiving and built from 1749 by Ventura Rodríguez, his first major work: a plan of five linked ellipses and a concave atrium facade. On the corner with Calle de la Libertad, an eating house opened in 1854 that since 1925 has been called La Carmencita, the second-oldest tavern in Madrid. Federico García Lorca lived just above and would come down to talk with the writers of the Generation of '27 who frequented it, among them Neruda and Miguel Hernández.