Travesía de las Vistillas

Travesía de las Vistillas descends on a gentle slope between plaza de San Francisco el Grande and calle de Don Pedro, in the Palacio neighborhood. It runs along the edge of a hill that already in the Middle Ages served as a natural defense, where the dense web of convents opens suddenly toward the river. The hill owes its name to the panoramas seen from its summit: the Guadarrama range, the Manzanares, the Casa de Campo and the Royal Palace. It appears labeled “Vistillas de San Francisco” as early as Texeira’s 1656 map. In 1835, when the council renamed Madrid’s streets, the travesía took the name of las Vistillas, the same one the hill’s square received that year. In the early 20th century, the building on the corner with San Buenaventura held a story of artists: there the sculptor Victorio Macho kept his studio while working on the monument to Galdós, and later the painter Ignacio Zuloaga lived in it until his death in 1945.

The corner building between the Travesía de las Vistillas and Calle San Buenaventura was the successive studio of two major figures of Spanish art. Victorio Macho occupied it in the 1920s after winning the commission for the monument to Pérez Galdós for the Retiro. Ignacio Zuloaga later rented it and died there on 31 October 1945; the painter chose that place, as he left in writing, for the view of the Royal Palace and the Sierra.