Travesía de Andrés Mellado

The name points not to a person but to another street: it springs from the calle de Andrés Mellado, which this cross-street cuts and links in the heart of Gaztambide, like so many Madrid cross-streets that inherit the name of the artery they branch from. The parent street received it in 1893, in tribute to Andrés Mellado y Fernández (Málaga, 1846 — Biarritz, 1913). He studied law but soon swapped the courts for the newsroom: he ran El Imparcial for a decade, was mayor of Madrid in 1889 and, in 1912, entered the Royal Spanish Academy. Before bearing his name, the main street had been called Tarifa. Nearby, on the Cerro del Pimiento, an epidemics hospital was raised in the late nineteenth century against cholera and plague; it was short-lived and vanished around 1905. From that wasteland grew a residential neighbourhood, and among its blocks this short, discreet cross-street remained.