Travesía de la Infanta Mercedes

This short street crosses from the calle de la Infanta Mercedes and takes its name from it. Behind it is María de las Mercedes de Borbón, born in Madrid in 1880, eldest daughter of Alfonso XII. Her title marks a singular chapter of the crown. When her father died in 1885, the girl was five and became heir, but she was not proclaimed queen: her mother was pregnant and a boy would take precedence. That boy was born in May 1886 and reigned from the cradle as Alfonso XIII. Mercedes was Princess of Asturias until she married in 1901, and died three years later from childbirth complications, aged twenty-four. The name took hold as Cuatro Caminos turned from open ground into a neighborhood, beside the old road to France, today the calle de Bravo Murillo. The Travesía de la Infanta Mercedes keeps that slight scale: barely sixty meters of a street map laid out when the infanta was still a child.