Calle de Serrano & Ortega y Gasset: The Golden Mile
Why is it significant?
Stand on the corner of Calle de Serrano and Calle de José Ortega y Gasset and watch the parade: shopping bags with ribbon handles, doormen in grey coats, a window display that probably cost more than a car. This is the Milla de Oro, the Golden Mile. The name is an exaggeration in both directions.
Key Facts
| Place | Calle de Serrano & Ortega y Gasset: The Golden Mile |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Serrano 50, 28001 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.43040, -3.68660 |
| Part of Walk | The Marquis Who Built a City: Madrid's Salamanca District & the Castellana |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the corner of Calle de Serrano and Calle de José Ortega y Gasset and watch the parade: shopping bags with ribbon handles, doormen in grey coats, a window display that probably cost more than a car. This is the Milla de Oro, the Golden Mile.
The name is an exaggeration in both directions. It is not exactly a mile, and it is not one street but a little grid of them, Serrano, Ortega y Gasset, Goya, Jorge Juan, Claudio Coello and their neighbours. Together they make up the most expensive shopping streets in Spain, home to the flagship stores of fashion houses from Madrid to Milan and Paris.
The street names make an odd couple. Serrano honours Francisco Serrano, a nineteenth-century general who was handsome enough to be nicknamed el general bonito, and who served as regent of Spain between 1869 and 1871. Ortega y Gasset honours the great Madrid philosopher, author of The Revolt of the Masses... who might have had a thing or two to say about this temple of consumption.
Walk a few steps up Serrano and look for the building with the glazed tiles and fanciful stone tracery at number 61. It was built at the very end of the nineteenth century for the publisher of the magazine Blanco y Negro, and it became the home of the newspaper ABC, founded in 1903. Presses once thundered in its basement. The paper moved out long ago, and the building is now a shopping arcade, but the old façade is still there for anyone who looks up.
That is the Salamanca district in one block: a nineteenth-century body wearing twenty-first-century clothes. Look at the upper floors, not the windows, and the city of the Marquis is intact. Now continue north on Serrano, then cut left along Calle de Juan Bravo to the bridge over the Castellana. Underneath it waits a museum with no doors, no tickets and no roof.