Gran Vía: The Avenue of Shells

Why is it significant?

Pause on the pavement of Gran Vía, with its theatres, its rooftop statues and its endless river of traffic, and try to imagine it emptied: shop windows boarded up, sandbags piled against doorways, and people walking fast, close to the walls.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Pause on the pavement of Gran Vía, with its theatres, its rooftop statues and its endless river of traffic, and try to imagine it emptied: shop windows boarded up, sandbags piled against doorways, and people walking fast, close to the walls.

From November 1936 the front line ran only a few kilometres west of here, through the Casa de Campo park and the new University City. Nationalist artillery dug in on the high ground of the Casa de Campo, on the hill called Garabitas, and its guns could reach the heart of the city. The long, straight line of Gran Vía, with the tall Telefónica tower at its middle as an aiming mark, was hit again and again. Madrileños began to call their showpiece street the Avenida de los Obuses... the Avenue of Shells.

And yet the city refused to stop living. Cinemas along Gran Vía went on showing films through much of the siege, and people queued for them between bombardments. Trams kept running, cafés served whatever there was to serve, which was often very little. People learned the rhythm of the shelling the way other cities learn the timetable of their buses.

The street's very name is a small map of Spain's twentieth century. Gran Vía was carved through the old town from 1910 onwards, swallowing hundreds of houses, and it took around two decades to complete. During the war, parts of it were renamed in honour of the Soviet Union, the Republic's main ally. After Franco's victory in 1939 it became the Avenida de José Antonio, after the founder of the Falange, and that is what the signs said for four decades. Only in 1981 did the city officially give back the name that everyone had kept using anyway: Gran Vía.

So when a Madrileño of a certain age says Gran Vía, there are layers underneath the word... names, flags, and the memory of a street where you learned to listen for the whistle of an incoming shell. Keep walking east. The tall stone tower rising ahead of you, at the corner of Calle de Fuencarral, was the target everyone was aiming at.