Calle de Velázquez: Inside the Grid
Why is it significant?
Stop at the crossing of Calle de Velázquez and Calle de Goya and look down each street in turn. Dead straight, all four of them. Now look at the corners: the buildings do not meet at a sharp angle, they are cut off diagonally, so the crossroads opens up like a small square.
Key Facts
| Place | Calle de Velázquez: Inside the Grid |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Velázquez 28, 28001 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.42490, -3.68400 |
| Part of Walk | The Marquis Who Built a City: Madrid's Salamanca District & the Castellana |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the crossing of Calle de Velázquez and Calle de Goya and look down each street in turn. Dead straight, all four of them. Now look at the corners: the buildings do not meet at a sharp angle, they are cut off diagonally, so the crossroads opens up like a small square.
That is the signature of the Ensanche, the extension. By the 1850s old Madrid was choking inside its walls, and in 1860 the government approved a plan by the engineer Carlos María de Castro. A grid of broad streets would spread north and east, with blocks of moderate height and, on paper, generous gardens in the middle of each block. The cut corners gave carriages room to turn and let more light and air into the crossroads.
The Marquis of Salamanca threw himself into this eastern part of the plan. He bought land, built rows of houses and promised the modern comforts of the age: gas lighting, running water, proper drains. Locals like to say these were the first homes in Madrid with indoor toilets. Whether or not that is strictly true, it tells you how new they felt. He even helped launch Madrid's first horse-drawn tram in 1871, so that his buyers could ride from Puerta del Sol to their new front doors.
The trouble was that the city had not yet caught up with him. The houses were expensive, the fields were muddy, and buyers came slowly. And as land values rose, later builders filled in the generous inner gardens and added floors that Castro never imagined.
Read the street signs as you go: Velázquez and Goya, the painters; Claudio Coello, another painter; Lagasca, a botanist; Jorge Juan, an eighteenth-century scientist and sailor. The grid is a little pantheon of Spanish talent. Turn north up Velázquez, then left along Calle de Ayala, to a place where this elegant quarter still does its daily shopping.