Calle de Santa Águeda

Calle de Santa Águeda drops from Santa Brígida to San Mateo, in the heart of the Justicia neighbourhood. On Texeira’s 1656 map it still went by another name, Calle de San Antonio, lent by the Antonine hospital that closed off its northern flank. That hospital dedicated its sickrooms to different saints, and the one facing this street bore the name of Santa Águeda; by the 18th century the sign was settled. When Pius VI suppressed the Antonine Order in 1787, the building fell empty, and in 1793 Charles IV handed it to the Piarists, who turned it into the Escuelas Pías de San Antón. Through the 19th century the street lived on small industry and printing. Its great neighbour was the Teatro Martín, raised in 1870 and remodelled in 1919 to seat 1,300: its stage saw everything, from light zarzuela to the concerts of the Movida, with Nacha Pop and Alaska y los Pegamoides on the boards. It closed in 1989. Whoever strolls here today walks through a Galdós set; the novelist used the street in El amigo manso and in Ángel Guerra.

In July 1999, a young man named Modesto Martínez used silicone to fix an official-looking plaque to the façade of the IES San Mateo, on the unnamed alley connecting San Mateo with Beneficencia beside the end of Santa Águeda, labeling it “Pasaje de Modesto Martínez.” The joke prospered: the name came to be published in the Official Gazette of the Community of Madrid (19 February 2009) and was picked up by guidebooks and the press before the plaque was removed. Twenty-three years later, in 2022, the plaque was put back in the same place by its protagonists.