Travesía de Téllez
Travesía de Téllez takes its name from the surname Téllez, shared with the main street it feeds into as a side access, in the Pacífico neighborhood. The area was laid out between 1875 and 1885 as part of Madrid’s southern expansion, beside Atocha station, and its streets received the names of figures from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: writers, botanists and naval officers. The exact reference of the surname has not been established with documentary certainty; the best-founded hypothesis points to Gabriel Téllez (Tirso de Molina, 1579–1648), the Madrid-born Mercedarian playwright, whose maternal surname he used before adopting his pen name.
Travesía de Téllez is a short street in the Pacífico neighborhood, in Retiro, running alongside Calle de Téllez as a side access, almost grazing the rail lines on the southern flank of Atocha station. The area was laid out between 1875 and 1885, when the city council urbanized this piece of the southern expansion, squeezed between the Valencia road and the railway tracks.
When naming the new streets, the planners drew on a repertoire of historical figures mixing trades and centuries, with writers, scientists and sailors sharing the map. Into that taste for great names fits the most suggestive candidate for the name: Gabriel Téllez, a Mercedarian friar born in Madrid around 1579, who under the pen name Tirso de Molina wrote El burlador de Sevilla, the play that gave birth to the myth of Don Juan.
Even so, caution is warranted: no record survives to confirm Tirso as the reference. Nor can something more prosaic be ruled out, an owner of those lands named Téllez, a custom as common in the nineteenth-century expansions as honoring the classics.