The Marquis Who Built a City: Madrid's Salamanca District & the Castellana

From a banker's palace on Recoletos through the 19th-century grid he went broke building, past the Lady of Elche and a mermaid hanging from a bridge, to Sorolla's sunlit garden

Madrid · 11 stops · 24 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Palacio del Marqués de Salamanca: The Banker's Palace

   Paseo de Recoletos 10, 28001 Madrid, Spain

   Stand on the leafy central walk of Paseo de Recoletos and face the pale, square palace behind the railings, with its tall windows and its terrace of stone balusters. It looks calm and respectable. The man who built it was anything but.

   José de Salamanca was born in Málaga in 1811, trained as a lawyer, and discovered that his real talent was money. He made a fortune on government contracts, including the state salt monopoly, then on banking and on the new railways. He built the line from Madrid to Aranjuez, opened in 1851, one of the first railways in Spain, and he was briefly Minister of Finance. Madrid called him a genius, a gambler and a crook, sometimes in the same sentence.

   This palace, built between the 1840s and 1858, was his trophy. He filled it with paintings, antiquities and a library, and threw parties that the city talked about for weeks. The story goes that it was the first house in Madrid with hot running water in its bathrooms... at a time when most of the city still carried its water up the stairs in jugs.

   But here is the twist. Salamanca rarely stopped at one bet. Looking out from these windows at the open fields to the east, he decided to build an entire new neighbourhood, wide streets, modern houses, gas and plumbing for the rising middle class. It would ruin him. In 1876 he had to sell this very palace to a mortgage bank, and today it belongs to a bank still, home to a cultural foundation.

   So this walk is the story of one man's oversized dream: the grid he laid out, the boulevard it fed into, and the collectors and painters who later settled along it. Walk north along Recoletos, under the plane trees, towards the tall column and the big flag of Plaza de Colón. Every block from here on carries a little of his signature.

2. 2. Plaza de Colón & Jardines del Descubrimiento

   Plaza de Colón, 28001 Madrid, Spain

   Let the traffic roar past for a moment and find the slender stone column in the middle of the square, with a small white figure of Christopher Columbus on top, one hand raised towards the west. Behind him flaps one of the largest Spanish flags in the country, and beyond that rises a pair of strange office towers.

   The column went up in 1885, a lacy neo-Gothic needle designed by Arturo Mélida, with the statue carved by Jerónimo Suñol. Around its base, reliefs tell the voyage of 1492 like a stone comic strip: the ships, the landing, the queen who paid for it. The flag above you is much newer, first raised in 2001, and on a windy day you can hear it crack like a sail.

   Now look at the massive rough blocks of concrete on the garden side, the Jardines del Descubrimiento. They are a monument from 1977 by the artist Joaquín Vaquero Turcios, carved with maps, prophecies and the words of chroniclers. Under your feet, behind the curtain of the old waterfall, lies a whole theatre and cultural centre, built into the hollow beneath the square.

   And those two towers? The Torres de Colón, finished in 1976 by the architect Antonio Lamela, were built upside down. First came the concrete cores, then the floors were hung from the top and added downwards, like a stack of trays suspended from a hook. In the 1990s someone added a green crown with a little spike on top, and Madrid immediately nicknamed it the plug... el enchufe.

   It is fitting that this square is a hinge. To the south lies old Madrid; to the north, the long Castellana; and to the east, the grid the Marquis of Salamanca bet his fortune on. Turn towards the huge classical palace on the eastern side and walk round to Calle de Serrano, where a stone staircase leads up to a Spanish queen from two and a half thousand years ago.

3. 3. Museo Arqueológico Nacional & Biblioteca Nacional

   Calle de Serrano 13, 28001 Madrid, Spain

   Walk along the railings until you face the long classical façade on Calle de Serrano, with its stone stairs and its row of columns. It is one building, but it has two front doors: on this side the National Archaeological Museum, on the far side, facing Recoletos, the National Library of Spain.

   Queen Isabel II laid the first stone in 1866, and the work dragged on for so long that the palace was only finished in 1892, just in time for the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus reaching America. The library inside is far older than its home. Philip V founded it in 1711 as a royal public library, and within a few years printers were obliged to send it a copy of every book they made. That rule is why the shelves inside now hold millions of items.

   But the star on this side is a woman. In 1897, at La Alcudia near Elche, on the Mediterranean coast, a young farm labourer struck stone with his pick and uncovered a carved head and shoulders. She wears huge wheel-shaped coils over her ears, heavy necklaces and a serene, almost stern face. She is the Lady of Elche, Iberian, carved around the fifth or fourth century before Christ.

   Within days she was sold to a French archaeologist and shipped to the Louvre. She stayed in Paris for more than forty years, until an exchange of art between Spain and France brought her home in 1941. She spent three decades in the Prado and moved to this museum in 1971. There is a hollow in her back... and many archaeologists believe she once held the ashes of the dead.

   The museum reopened in 2014 after a long renovation, and the Lady now shares the galleries with Roman mosaics, Visigothic votive crowns and Moorish ivory caskets. From the museum steps, cross Calle de Serrano and head east along Calle de Goya. Two blocks on, you reach the street of a painter, and the grid that made Salamanca famous.

4. 4. Calle de Velázquez: Inside the Grid

   Calle de Velázquez 28, 28001 Madrid, Spain

   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.

5. 5. Mercado de la Paz: The Neighbourhood Pantry

   Calle de Ayala 28, 28001 Madrid, Spain

   Step off Calle de Ayala through the passage and into the covered hall, and the noise changes at once: knives on boards, the slap of fish on ice, someone calling a number at the cheese counter. Welcome to the Mercado de la Paz.

   A market has stood on this spot since the 1880s, which makes it one of the oldest still trading in Madrid. When the new district was young, its residents needed somewhere to buy bread, meat and vegetables without a long trip into the old city, and a market of iron and glass was built in the middle of the grid. The building has been changed and modernised since, but the job has never changed.

   Here is the paradox of Salamanca. Outside, a few blocks away, are some of the most expensive shop windows in Spain. In here, the same families who shop there still queue for their fish on a Saturday morning, chatting with stallholders whose parents served their parents. Look at how the ham is sliced by hand, paper thin, and how carefully a customer chooses one tomato over another.

   Madrid has a strange relationship with the sea. It lies more than three hundred kilometres from the nearest coast, yet it is often said to have one of the best fish markets in the world. Every night, lorries race fresh catch inland so that it is on these counters by morning. Watch the fishmongers work: they gut, scale and fillet to order, in seconds, without looking.

   Markets like this were once the heart of every Madrid neighbourhood, and many lost their customers to supermarkets in the late twentieth century. La Paz survived by staying exactly what it was, a pantry with a social life. When you have breathed in enough cured ham, head out and walk east and north through the grid to the square that bears the name of the man who started it all.

6. 6. Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca: The Bankrupt Founder

   Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, 28006 Madrid, Spain

   Here in the middle of the square stands the man himself, in bronze, on a tall pedestal, coat buttoned, gazing over the traffic. José de Salamanca, Marquis of Salamanca and Count of los Llanos, looking every inch the founder of a city.

   He was not shy about titles. He was made a marquis in 1863 and a count soon after. But the honours came alongside a pile of debts. Building a whole district on credit, in a city that had not yet decided to move east, was a trap that tightened year by year. He sold land, borrowed again, sold houses below cost, and borrowed once more. Friends said he lived as if he were still rich, long after the money had gone... and perhaps that was the only way to keep the creditors believing in him.

   By the end of his life the great financier was close to ruin. He had sold his palace on Recoletos, much of his art collection had gone, and he died in 1883 at his country estate of Vista Alegre, in Carabanchel, south of the city. One of the richest men in Spain left behind little more than his name on the map.

   And yet the bet came good... just not for him. Within a generation of his death, the Salamanca district had become the most fashionable address in Madrid, the place where aristocrats, bankers and professionals built their homes. Look at the façades around this square: iron balconies, carved stone, bay windows called miradores that let the light pour in. This is exactly the comfortable bourgeois city he had imagined, a few decades too early.

   There is a lesson Madrid likes to tell about him: he was right about everything except the timing. His statue was put up here around twenty years after his death, by a city that had finally caught up with his vision. From the square, walk west along Calle de José Ortega y Gasset, back towards Serrano, onto what Madrid calls its Golden Mile.

7. 7. Calle de Serrano & Ortega y Gasset: The Golden Mile

   Calle de Serrano 50, 28001 Madrid, Spain

   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.

8. 8. Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre: The Mermaid on the Bridge

   Paseo de la Castellana, 28046 Madrid, Spain

   Walk down the ramp beneath the bridge and stand among the sculptures: bronze, steel, stone and concrete shapes scattered across a sunken plaza, with the traffic of the Castellana roaring past on either side. Then look straight up. Hanging from the underside of the bridge, held by steel cables, is a huge block of concrete.

   This is the Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre, the Open-Air Sculpture Museum. When the bridge linking Calle de Juan Bravo and Calle de Eduardo Dato was built around 1970, its engineers, José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez and Julio Martínez Calzón, decided that the dead space beneath it should become a gallery. The artist Eusebio Sempere designed the railing above, and some of the best Spanish sculptors of the century donated works.

   Look around you: there is a bronze by Joan Miró, pieces by Julio González and Pablo Serrano, a work by Alberto Sánchez, the sculptor of rural Castile. All of it abstract, all of it free, open day and night. In the early 1970s, while Spain was still a dictatorship, this was a quietly radical gesture: modern art in the street, for everyone.

   And then there is the mermaid. Eduardo Chillida's La sirena varada, the Stranded Mermaid, weighs around six tonnes, and it was designed to hang exactly where you see it now. In 1972 the city authorities refused. What if the cables failed and six tonnes of concrete landed on the traffic? The engineers protested that the bridge was built for it. The argument dragged on for years, and the sculpture spent them on the ground, far from its intended home.

   Finally, in 1978, the mermaid was lifted into the air, and she has floated over the Castellana ever since. Nothing has fallen. Climb back up to street level and follow Calle de Serrano north to Calle de María de Molina, to the home of a man who collected art the way others collect stamps.

9. 9. Museo Lázaro Galdiano: Parque Florido

   Calle de Serrano 122, 28006 Madrid, Spain

   Look through the railings at the villa in its garden, cream-coloured, Italianate, with a grand entrance and a lawn shaded by trees. It looks like a small private paradise dropped onto busy Calle de Serrano. That is exactly what it was, and its name was Parque Florido.

   It belonged to José Lázaro Galdiano, a lawyer turned publisher, financier and the most obsessive collector Madrid has ever known. He married Paula Florido, a wealthy Argentine widow, and named the house after her. They built it in the first decade of the twentieth century, as a home and as a jewel box for his treasures.

   And what treasures. Lázaro bought paintings, ivories, enamels, jewels, weapons, fans, manuscripts and coins, more than twelve thousand objects in all. Inside hangs a small, terrifying Goya, The Witches' Sabbath, with a great goat presiding over a ring of women offering it babies. There is a Saint John the Baptist by Hieronymus Bosch, sitting in a landscape full of strange plants, and works by El Greco, Zurbarán and Murillo.

   Lázaro was also a publisher with a mission. His magazine, La España Moderna, brought European writers such as Tolstoy to Spanish readers in translation. During the Civil War he lived abroad, in Paris and then New York, and kept buying. When he died in Madrid in 1947, he left the house and everything in it to the Spanish state. The museum opened in 1951.

   Look up at the ceilings when you go in: he had them painted with allegories and homages to the artists he loved. It is the rare museum where you feel the collector still lives upstairs, and might come down at any moment to tell you how he outbid a rival for that little ivory. From the gate, cross Calle de Serrano, walk west along Calle de María de Molina and continue to the great roundabout on the Castellana, where an orator in bronze is waiting.

10. 10. Glorieta de Emilio Castelar: The Grand Boulevard

    Glorieta de Emilio Castelar, 28010 Madrid, Spain

    From the edge of the roundabout, look at the white marble monument rising out of the traffic: a man in a frock coat, one arm outstretched, mid-sentence, surrounded by allegorical figures. And then look down the boulevard in both directions. It seems to run for ever.

    The man is Emilio Castelar, and the monument, unveiled in 1908, is by Mariano Benlliure, the most famous Spanish sculptor of his day. Castelar was a professor of history and the greatest orator of nineteenth-century Spain. In 1873 and 1874 he led the government of the short-lived First Republic, and people said that when he spoke in parliament even his enemies stayed to listen.

    The boulevard is the Paseo de la Castellana, and it takes its name from a long-vanished spring and fountain, the Fuente Castellana. In the nineteenth century it was a fashionable promenade lined with aristocratic mansions and gardens, where Madrid society drove its carriages on Sunday afternoons. Then the city grew north, and the Castellana grew with it, until it became the spine of modern Madrid, some six kilometres long and still running, past ministries, banks and the football stadium of Real Madrid.

    Most of those mansions are gone. In the boom of the 1960s and 1970s, palace after palace came down to make room for office blocks, a loss that still makes Madrid architects wince. The name changed too: after the Civil War the boulevard was renamed in honour of Franco, and it only got its old name back in 1980.

    So stand here and you are at a crossroads of two Madrids: the nineteenth-century city of orators and carriages, and the glass towers marching north to the horizon. For the last stop, take Paseo del General Martínez Campos, the street running west from the roundabout. A few minutes along, behind a garden wall, a painter is waiting for you in the sunshine.

11. 11. Museo Sorolla: The Painter's House and Garden

    Paseo del General Martínez Campos 37, 28010 Madrid, Spain

    Step through the gate and you are suddenly out of Madrid: tiles, myrtle hedges, the trickle of fountains, a long narrow pool, a bench under a pergola, and a red-brick house wrapped in climbing plants. This is the house of Joaquín Sorolla, the painter of light.

    Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863 and became the most successful Spanish painter of his time, famous for beaches full of children, sails and dazzling Mediterranean sun. With his earnings he built this house in 1910 and 1911, and he designed the garden himself, in three parts, inspired by what he had painted at the Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar in Seville. He wanted a piece of the south in the heart of the capital... and he painted it again and again.

    Inside, the great studio remains as he left it, with his brushes, his easels and canvases that seem to give off heat. Between 1911 and 1919 he worked on his biggest commission, fourteen enormous panels called Vision of Spain for the Hispanic Society in New York, a portrait of the regions of the whole country.

    It was here, in his own garden, in June 1920, that Sorolla suffered a stroke while painting a portrait. He never painted again. He died three years later, in 1923, in Cercedilla in the mountains north of Madrid. His widow, Clotilde García del Castillo, his lifelong model and muse, left the house and its contents to the state, and the museum opened in 1932.

    Sit on one of the tiled benches for a moment and listen to the water. You started this walk at the palace of a banker who bet on a city of the future. You end it in the garden of a painter who built himself a small, private paradise inside that city. Both of them, in their way, won. The walk ends here... and Madrid's afternoon light is all yours.