Who's Who On The Madrid Metro

Alvarado

Thanks to his blonde hair and beard, Pedro de Alvarado, native of Badajoz, was called The Sun God by the people he slaughtered, converted and conquered. The archetypical conquistador, Alvarado was known in his time for his brutality, among Spanish and among the indigenous peoples he, along with a few of their local enemies, massacred. La Noche Triste is perhaps the most evocative of all Alvarado’s exploits: when he, Cortes and the Spanish, many laden with gold, fled the lake island Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan - the centre of modern day Mexico City - by a long causeway in the rain, attacked on every side from canoes and along the narrow walkway itself by warriors. Cortes was crying by the time they reached the mainland and turned to see Alvardo, covered in blood, sword raised, staggering off the causeway through the rain. A thousand Tlaxcaltecs and almost nine hundred Spaniards died that night. 

Ríos Rosas

Mr Pink Rivers, or Antonio Sánchez del Río y López de la Rosa, to give him the name he was baptised with down Ronda way, was born three days before the Cortes de Cádiz passed the first Spanish constitution. Educated at the University of Granada, Toni made a name for himself in Malagan politics, rising through the ranks with the press - El Correo Nacional and El Heraldo - on his side. By 1840 he was in Madrid, famous as a great orator, his exploits spread by his own newspapers, El Tiempo, El Globo and El Universal. He was elected leader of the Congress of Deputies three times and, among many honours, became a member of the Spanish Royal Academy. These days the great bushy bearded one lies in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men in a shady corner of the Retiro park.

Tirso de Molina

Gabriel Téllez, to give him his proper name, was the monk who came up with Don Juan, though the great lover, like many of the writer’s themes and subjects, was floating about in the common consciousness of the time. Molina - because now we’re talking about the legendary playwright of the Golden Age - slid into theatres in Lope de Vega’s slipstream - giving familiar themes his own original twist, sometimes dropping in a moral lesson, sometimes not. He was a traveller who’d been around a bit and what he’d seen gave his plays depth and backdrops exotic. Something of a Stevie Wonder as far as his output went, when Molina was bad he was awful but when good, he was the master blaster jammin’.

Antón Martín

Cuenca, 1500. Two young peasant boys mourn the death of their father. Their mother remarries and neither of the brothers like their new step-dad: in fact they hate him enough that they scarper. Young Antón bolts for Madrid and a career in the army. After training, he’s sent to Valencia, where he works for the Coast Guard and then as a Customs Officer but this new life turns sour when news reaches him that his brother Pedro has been murdered in Granada in cold blood. Antón understandably goes Batman - heading down to Granada looking for cold, sweet revenge. Before slipping off this mortal coil, Pedro had been at a religious hospital in Granada, being looked after by none other than San Juan de Díos himself. When Antón arrives, red-faced, teeth clenched, huffing and puffing, San Juan kneels before him, crucifix in hand, and converts the fucker right there and then. Antón’s heart is cleansed and never looks back. Under the saint’s spell, he spreads the word, working with the sick and poor ‘til he dies and is buried in Madrid.

Menéndez Pelayo

Marcelino liked books, let’s put it that way. Born in 1856, at twelve he was translating Virgil into Spanish for fun. By the end of his life he’d been the director of the National Library - that huge, lovely building on Colón - was a member of various Royal Academies, was knighted by Alfonso XII and had so many books his own private collection is now a library itself in his hometown of Santander. Something of a Fellini and the Oscars with the Nobel Prize, Marcelino was nominated five times but never won the jackpot. Though he worked hard - his work on the great Golden Age writers is still prized - Marcelino, who was openly camp and single all his life, hammered the coffee and booze and died fat and young at fifty-six years old. Probably crushed by his to-read pile which had toppled over.

Miguel Hernández

Miguel is one of those people who got nothing easy but his talent. And boy did he pay for it, having it nearly beaten out of him by his father before being mocked by the literati in Madrid for being a yokel and ending up on the losing side of the Civil War. Beaten and imprisoned, condemned as a “despicable” and “dangerous” Spaniard, Hernández lost a young son in infancy and died in jail. But throughout his life he studied his art and wrote what he saw and felt, whether it was the birth of a goat kid in the countryside near Murcia, or a lullaby to his wife written on torn toilet paper from jail when she told him she was living on a diet of onions and bread. There he contrasted his and her sorrow and suffering with the future of their son, “rival of the sun. Future of my bones and of my love.” The child Manuel Miguel lived until 1984. Josefina, his great muse, died in Alicante in 1987, seventy-seven years after Miguel.

Quevedo

“Reading,” wrote Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas, “is listening to the dead with our eyes.” His own eyes, thanks to myopia, were always hidden behind a pince-nez and pince-nez in Spanish is now quevedos after him. If you’d have been alive back then, you’d have known of him and would have read something of his. If you’d lived in what is now known as the Barrio de las Letras, you might have seen him stumbling home in his cape trailing smoke. You’d have loved his pithy pisstakes of other writers but you’d have been weary of him, with his quick tongue and quick temper: you’d have known he once ran a man through outside church for bothering a woman inside. A holy, moral man who loved brothels, boozing and hunting, Quevedo’s grave was robbed not long after his death by a man who wanted his gold heel spurs.

San Bernardo

Bernard of Clairvaux is the last of Dante’s guides in The Divine Comedy, largely on account of his way with words. A student of rhetoric, son of nobles and well-educated, Bernard was almost protestant in his religion, advocating a personally held faith and preaching the Virgin as an intercessor. “I believe, though I do not comprehend,” he said. “I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.” He made the speech of his life at the start of the second crusade, when there was little of the public enthusiasm for seizing Jerusalem back from the infidels as there had been the first time around. At Vezelay, about two hundred kilometres south of Paris, he gave a mighty speech on a hill which ended up with him using his own torn robes to make crosses after the frothing convert conscripts had torn up all the tents and available cloth.

Santo Domingo

Domingo de Guzmán never slept in a bed while there was a floor, walked barefoot in any weather, didn’t eat meat, fasted regularly and liked a vow of silence. If he did talk, it was to tell anyone following him to be charitable, humble and to treasure their poverty. It’s him who said we had to rule our passions or they would rule us. Reminiscent of Gandhi, Sñr Guzman said he’d always known he had to be a saint and that if he wasn’t being a saint, he felt he was doing nothing. Big mates with Francis of Assisi, Domingo has two countries named after him and, perhaps most importantly, St Domingo’s FC was the original name of Everton FC, by the far the world’s greatest football team.

Principe de Vergara

“I don’t have any enemies,” said the Most Excellent Joaquín Baldomero Fernández-Espartero y Álvarez de Toro once said. “Because I’ve shot them all.” King Amadeo I, an Italian prince who reigned in Spain for three years between 1870 and 1873, made him Principe de Vergara, a title which died with him. You’d have had to call him Your Highness but if you’d been alive back then you probably would have done anyway, knowing how this son of a cart maker in Seville had come back from the Peninsular Wars a hero and had gone swashbuckling into politics as one of the ‘big swords’. Always popular with the good old ordinary people, there was a minute after the glorious revolution when Joaquo might even have been King himself. But it wasn’t to be. Perhaps better for someone who once said, A Barcelona hay que bombardearla al menos una vez cada 50 años.

Goya

Who doesn’t know old Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes? Who hasn’t seen the amazing black paintings he daubed on the walls of his house out in Carabanchel? “Always lines, never forms!” he’d remark. “But where do they find these lines in Nature? For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.” Converted to painting as a young man, Goya was always successful but remained dedicated to art, his truth. "The dream of reason produces monsters," he said. "Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty” which is hard to argue with. Franny died in Bordeaux and literally lost his head there, probably to medical science. Later, when it was decided to dig him up and ship him back to Madrid, the Spanish Counsel in France was told “send Goya, with or without head”. He now lies under one of his own frescos near Principe Pio.

Manuel Becerra

Manuel Becerra Bermúdez fought on the streets of Madrid during the revolution of 1854, which got him jailed. As soon as he got out he was back scrapping, this time leading a battalion across where the Plaza de San Domingo stands today, not far from Callao and Gran Via. Exiled when he lost, he was in like Flynn after the 1868 Glorious Revolution and was soon Minister for Overseas in the new government. Always well-connected, Manu became Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Spain and died drinking a glass of milk not far from the Plaza Mayor. His own Plaza, where the Metro station is, was known as the Plaza de Alegría before being renamed. Manu was from Lugo, for his sins.

San Cristóbal

San Cristóbal de Licia, or Saint Christopher in English, is a toughie. There’s no historical proof he ever existed, yet his myth has become so prevalent that it almost doesn’t matter. He was a big man who used to carry people across a river. One day he carried a child across the river and started moaning about how much the kid weighed, only to be told that he’d just borne on his back the world and He who created it: thus Christ-Bearer, his name, thus he became the Patron Saint of Travellers. There’s another story - and Pliny the Elder, worryingly, would vouch for the premise - that St Christopher was one of a race of Ethiopian people who had the heads of dogs and barked and ate human flesh. 

San Fermín

Here we go again. There’s not much to go on here, again, but who can resist the little dude in the wall everyone waves their rolled up newspapers at before the bull runs every day during his festival in Pamplona? The legend is that Fermín was the town’s first bishop. Later he wandered off, ending up in Amiens in France where he was imprisoned and beheaded. Not to worry though, because when he was going to be dug up and given a proper burial, the ice melted on his grave, sweet odours drifted up through the soil, flowers flowered spontaneously and Julie Andrews came cartwheeling by in the nude, arse cheeks glimmering in the low winter sunlight. Maybe.

Miguel López de Legazpi

One of the most absurd deaths in history is that of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. After daring and finding a route to the modern-day Philippines, then known as the East Indies, he died during a misguided show of force against local tribespeople, shot in the leg with a poison arrow and left to die in the crystal surf. Forty-four years later our Basque hero Miguel arrived with five hundred mostly Mexican soldiers (they’d set sail from New Spain in the New World). He made Cebu City the capital of the Spanish East Indies in 1865 and later lived in Manila with his wife Isa, daughter of the bishop of Tlaxcala (modern day Mexico City) - they had nine children - and died of a heart attack after bollocking an aide, which creates a vivid picture. He was skint, too, but with nine kids that’s no surprise, Governor General or not.

Ventura Rodríguez

If you’ve spent any time in Madrid you’ve been in the presence of Buenaventura Rodríguez Tizón: his buildings are everywhere, his style writ in Spanish rococo. He’s that rather austere pinkish tinge you feel in the centre of town: a smell of powdered wig and refinement where the beautiful rectangles collide with the cloudless sky. Thrice married and thrice widowed during his life, Ventura died in Madrid at sixty-eight years old after suffering complications from a “cruel surgery”. But there he is, as you walk around, at the centre of Real Madrid’s celebrations as the architect of the fountain of Cibeles, at the great palace in Boadilla del Monte, at the church of San Marcos deep in the narrow streets of central Madrid and, along with Sabatini, who was in favour at the time, in the mighty dome of the Basilica de San Francisco el Grande near La Latina where his bones sleep.

Argüelles

Agustín Argüelles, the ‘Divine’, as they nicknamed him, was a silver-tongued liberal politician who was way ahead of his time. In the early 1800’s he spoke out against slavery, for a free press and a free market, wanted torture abolished and asked that minors be given legal rights and power. Fluent in English, he was sent to London to work on an alliance between England and Spain against Napoleon but was called back to national politics. On the downside he was a very high up Freemason, which might or might not have something to do with him constantly sniffing about the higher echelons of society. These days he lies in the Retiro park with all the other eminent, illustrious Metro station names.

Argüelles

Agustín Argüelles, the ‘Divine’, as they nicknamed him, was a silver-tongued liberal politician who was way ahead of his time. In the early 1800’s he spoke out against slavery, for a free press and a free market, wanted torture abolished and asked that minors be given legal rights and power. Fluent in English, he was sent to London to work on an alliance between England and Spain against Napoleon, but was called back to national politics. On the down side he was a very high up Freemason, which might or might not have something to do with him constantly sniffing about up in the higher echelons of society. These days he lies in the Retiro park with all the other eminent, illustrious Metro names.

San Bernardo

Bernard of Clairvaux is the last of Dante’s guides in The Divine Comedy, largely on account of his way with words. A student of rhetoric, son of nobles and well-educated, Bernard was almost protestant in his religion, advocating a personally held faith and preaching the Virgin as an intercessor. “I believe, though I do not comprehend,” he said. “I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.” He made the speech of his life at the start of the second crusade, when there was little of the public enthusiasm for seizing Jerusalem back from the infidels as there had been the first time around. At Vezelay, about two hundred kilometres south of Paris, he gave a mighty speech on a hill which ended up with him using his own torn robes to make crosses after the frothing convert conscripts had torn up all the tents and available cloth.

Alonso Martínez

Manuel Alonso Martínez stands as a kind of rock amid the rushing, turbulent waters of history he was standing in. A serious, learned man of letters, Alonso Martínez lives on in the civil code he was instrumental in drawing up which is still in use today. The archetypal lawyer, he was a businessman, father of nine, liberal and friend to royalty whose lifelong battle with bronchitis finally manifested itself in a lung cancer which finished him off. After he died his widow was given a royal title, while Manuel got a Metro station.

Colón

Cristoforo Columbo was on a mission from God to save the world before the apocalypse. Thanks to his misinformed sources - chief among them Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi - he got funding from Isabel and Ferdinand and set off for Cipangu (Japan), which the ever reliable Marco Polo had told him was near Cathay and which he thought he could make from Spain in about thirty days. After his death he travelled further than he ever had in life, buried first in Valladolid, then being shipped out to what is now the Dominican Republic, then to Cuba before finally being shipped back to Seville in 1898. He never actually stepped foot on the mainland of North America.

Serrano

The Metro is named after the street which is where Francisco Serrano Domínguez once lived. After the Glorious Revolution of 1868, he became Prime Minister of Spain, flitting between Madrid and exile in France as the political winds blew him. Wily, he was the first Duke of la Torre, a hereditary title created for him by Isabella II, who also had him as a lover.

Velázquez

Francis Bacon said, of the Sevillan Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez’s 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X, “I’ve always thought this was one of the greatest paintings in the world and I’ve had a crush on it.” Not many who have seen Velázquez’s paintings have not fallen a little bit in love with at least one of them, Las Meninas, or Los Borrachos. You can’t not. Even the King he managed to get work for, and who never paid his court painters, paid him. Velázquez travelled with him to Italy, too, and when an investigation into his lineage in lieu of a planned knighthood revealed the “stain” of Jewish blood in his biography, the King stepped in and over-ruled the commission and Velázquez was given the honour. He was buried with his wife in the vault of a Madrid church later destroyed by the invading French and his current whereabouts is unknown.

Goya

Who doesn’t know old Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes? Who hasn’t seen the amazing black paintings he daubed on the walls of his house out in Carabanchel? “Always lines, never forms!” he’d remark. “But where do they find these lines in Nature? For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.” Converted to painting as a young man, Goya was always successful but remained dedicated to art, his truth. “The dream of reason produces monsters,” he said. “Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty” which is hard to argue with. Franny died in Bordeaux and literally lost his head there, probably to medical science. Later, when it was decided to dig him up and ship him back to Madrid, the Spanish Counsel in France was told “send Goya, with or without head”. He now lies under one of his own frescos near Principe Pio.

Lista

Alberto José Francisco de Paula Jacobo de Jesús, later to become known as Alberto Rodríguez de Lista y Aragón was a maths prodigy as a child and was involved in education all his life. In 1788, 1789 and 1790 he was first in Maths in the country and went on to study theology and write poetry, penning a well-received ditty on the defeat of the French at Bailen. In and out of favour depending on who was in government, Lista got his own educational institute in Madrid opened up before being quickly shut down for being too liberal. He worked for and set up various reviews and publications whenever he was back from exile in London, taking time also to found the first free university in Madrid. A man with a touch of the Roald Dahl’s about him physically, it wasn’t until 1927 that his poetry was rediscovered. 

Diego de León

This Cordobese soldier showed mad valour throughout his life, putting himself in the line of fire and taking great risks in battle, but it was in his death he really showed his mettle. Caught by his enemies and sentenced to death at 34 years old in 1841. After writing a fatalistic note to his wife and children - “I know lots of tears are going to fall when you read this…I appeal to resignation, the sad consolation of the dying” - he appeared in front of the firing squad in full dress uniform. No tembléis, he told them, disparad al corazón. Don’t get nervous. Shoot straight for the heart.

Alfonso XIII

If you walk out of the Plaza Mayor and down Calle Mayor towards Calle Bailen and the Royal Palace, stop when you get to number 88 and look up at the top balconies. You’ll see a palm frond stretched across the bars of one balcony, a tribute to the twenty-four bystanders and onlookers murdered when Mateu Morral threw a bomb in a bunch of flowers down off the balcony at his intended victim, King Alfonso XIII, who was passing by on the way to his wedding. The King escaped unscathed, to go on ruling the country and indulging in his passion for making and watching porno movies.

Arturo Soria

The Aragonese Arturo Soria y Mata made his name and gave his name to what was then a new idea in architecture, connecting and building cities in ‘lines’, which would protect the balance between urban and rural. Before that though, he was into printing revolutionary pamphlets against the monarchy, flirting with covert action before becoming diverted by a passion for the emerging telecommunications Alexander Graham Bell had introduced to the world, which developed into a passion for town planning. “The straight line, he said, is the “master and mistress of a plan in all its details. It is perfection, comfort, wealth, health, education, republic, in short, it’s like a form of government.” He died in 1920 at 76 years old, saying, “I have sought the truth; I have not intended to do either a pious or an ungodly deed. What you see will have the colour of the glass through which you look at it.”

San Lorenzo

A Spanish saint! Rounded up with a load of other god-botherers in Rome in about the year 258, he was sentenced to death by being grilled over hot coals. Trapped between bars in his cooking cage, being slowly burnt to death, he apparently serenely mouthed the following words to his drooling torturers: “I’m done on that side, chaps - turn me over and eat me!” and thus became the patron saint of cooks. 

Diego de León

This Cordobese soldier showed mad valour throughout his life, putting himself in the line of fire and taking great risks in battle, but it was in his death he really showed his mettle. Caught by his enemies and sentenced to death at 34 years old in 1841. After writing a fatalistic note to his wife and children - “I know lots of tears are going to fall when you read this…I appeal to resignation, the sad consolation of the dying” - he appeared in front of the firing squad in full dress uniform. No tembléis, he told them, disparad al corazón. Don’t get nervous. Shoot straight for the heart.

Núñez de Balboa

First documented European to see the Pacific Ocean, this dude. Inspired by the stories of Columbus and the New World, he was one of the many rich but not first sons who headed across the sea to try and make their fortune. Vasco rocked up in Columbia, being shot at by locals with poison-tipped arrows. Slowly he got a foothold there, turning wild and mean, and eventually found himself hacking through the mosquito swamps and bush of modern day Panama, on September 27th, 1513, he climbed a hill alone and saw the great blue. 

Alonso Martínez

Manuel Alonso Martínez stands as a kind of rock amid the rushing, turbulent waters of history he was standing in. A serious, learned man of letters, Alonso Martínez lives on in the civil code he was instrumental in drawing up which is still in use today. The archetypal lawyer, he was a businessman, father of nine, liberal and friend to royalty whose lifelong battle with bronchitis finally manifested itself in a lung cancer which finished him off. After he died his widow was given a royal title, while Manuel got a Metro station.

Chueca

A lover of the gay life, Federico Chueca was a composer of Zarzuelas, a particularly Spanish entertainment, something between an opera and a musical. Born and bred in Madrid, he trained at the conservatory and studied medicine, also managing to get banged up in prison for being part of a student political protest (which inspired some work). He worked the cafe’s

Marques de Vadillo

Francisco Antonio de Salcedo y Aguirre, the marques of the title, was a high-ranking civil servant who worked through the reigns of Carlos II and Felipe V. A Basque, his contribution to Madrid can be seen in the Puente de Toledo and the lovely Campo del Moro, which is something of a hidden gem in Madrid, down by Principe Pio station at the bottom of the hill (bring bread for the ducks). 

Eugenia de Montijo

A Granada-born aristocrat who became Empress of the French after her marriage to Napoleon III (Bonaparte’s nephew) in 1853. She was actually the French head of state for a couple of months in 1870. Very much rich and strange, Eugenia and her family left Spain when the first Carlist war broke out. From then on, she was French. Word is that when Napoleon III met her, he asked, “What’s the way to your heart?” and she answered, “Through the chapel.” Exciting stuff.

Principe Pio

Named after the hill next to it, made famous by Goya’s painting, which was in turn named after the Italian who owned the land, Francisco Pía de Saboya. After taking the right side in the War of Spanish Succession, and being rewarded for it, Francisco drowned, somehow, in the Manzanares, when his carriage was swept into the river in a storm.

Argüelles

Agustín Argüelles, the ‘Divine’, as they nicknamed him, was a silver-tongued liberal politician who was way ahead of his time. In the early 1800’s he spoke out against slavery, for a free press and a free market, wanted torture abolished and asked that minors be given legal rights and power. Fluent in English, he was sent to London to work on an alliance between England and Spain against Napoleon, but was called back to national politics. On the down side he was a very high up Freemason, which might or might not have something to do with him constantly sniffing about up in the higher echelons of society. These days he lies in the Retiro park with all the other eminent, illustrious Metro names.

Vicente Aleixandre

Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977, one of the Generation of ‘27 which welcomed the avant garde and weird back into Spanish letters. Aleixandre’s poems are surreal, odd, compositions which set off mental fireworks in the minds of the readers. “Your hands made of petals and mine of bark, these delicious improvisations we show each other,

are good—for burning, for keeping faith in tomorrow, so that our talk can go on ignoring our clothes. I don’t notice our clothes. Do you?”

Guzmán el Bueno

Now this one’s a grisly tale: Alonso Pérez de Guzmán was, way back in 1294, the Lord of Tarifa. He may or may not have been Moroccan, a little detail later tidied up in historical retellings, but back then things were not as cut and dried as they seem now. Tarifa had not long been out of Moorish hands when messengers came to the town to inform Alonso that enemies of the King - in fact, Moorish militias under the command of the King’s treacherous brother - were on their way to Tarifa. Worse, they had Guzmán’s ten year old son Pedro with them. When Guzmán decided to stay loyal to the rightful King, the opposition troops threatened to slit Pedro’s throat. Guzmán famously retorted that they should go ahead - they would only confer eternal infamy on themselves and eternal life on his son. And so they did, decapitating Pedro into the bargain and catapulting his head over the castle walls. Guzmán kept his nerve and was rewarded with the title of “the noble one” which was then conferred on every Duke of Medina Sidonia that followed him.

Diego de León

This Cordobese soldier showed mad valour throughout his life, putting himself in the line of fire and taking great risks in battle, but it was in his death he really showed his mettle. Caught by his enemies and sentenced to death at 34 years old in 1841. After writing a fatalistic note to his wife and children - “I know lots of tears are going to fall when you read this…I appeal to resignation, the sad consolation of the dying” - he appeared in front of the firing squad in full dress uniform. No tembléis, he told them, disparad al corazón. Don’t get nervous. Shoot straight for the heart.

Manuel Becerra

Manuel Becerra Bermúdez fought on the streets of Madrid during the revolution of 1854, which got him jailed. As soon as he got out he was back scrapping, this time leading a battalion across where the Plaza de San Domingo stands today, not far from Callao and Gran Via. Exiled when he lost, he was in like Flynn after the 1868 Glorious Revolution and was soon Minister for Overseas in the new government. Always well-connected, Manu became Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Spain and died drinking a glass of milk not far from the Plaza Mayor. His own Plaza, where the Metro station  is, was known as the Plaza de Alegría before being renamed. Manu was from Lugo, for his sins.

O’Donnell

A descendent of the O’Donnells who left Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne, Leopoldo O’Donnell was a conservative, who gained favour from Isabel II when he came out of exile to defend her, ending up as Governor of Cuba. There, with him in charge, 1844 became known as the Year of the Lash. This was on account of his suspicion of the local slave population, and some of the locals themselves. Suspects were tied to ladders and whipped until they confessed. At least 78 were shot, thousands jailed and many more exiled from the island. O’Donnell sailed back to Spain and became Prime Minister three times. Many years later, after being relieved of his post by the Queen, he died quietly at Biarritz.

Sainz de Baranda

Pedro Casto Sainz de Baranda y Gorriti was the first mayor - or alcalde - of Madrid, and he took up the post in the fear and rubble which followed the French retreat from the capital in 1812. His efforts to shore up the city’s defences and make it governable again got him the title of The Madrid Dictator, but he was voted in as the city’s first mayor in 1820. Madrid at that time was a city in ruins. There were about two hundred thousand inhabitants living on five litres of water a day. Behind the churches were piles of corpses waiting to be buried and the citizens were locked in with them from ten at night in winter and eleven in summer. When the French did return, Pedro was deposed and in came Napoleon’s brother Joseph.

Méndez Álvaro

In 1843 Francisco Méndez Álvaro was mayor of Madrid for a month. When he wasn’t occupied with the post he was busy being a medical man, newspaper owner and contributor, politician and writer. His work on improving public hygiene in Madrid, working on wiping out cholera and the plague, which were still swilling about back then, gained him international renown, and he was also well decorated by his country. He died at 77, coming to us in history as the city’s most important bus station.

 San Fernando

The King who became a saint who became cities, towns and villages, has a date of birth that looks like a price tag, 1199. Famous in Spain for his efforts in reconquering and reuniting the country after the Almohads were driven out, he was canonised by Pope Clement X in 1671. Almost a one-man sticking glue, during his lifetime, in one way or another, he reunited Castille and León, as well as bringing Seville, Cordoba, Badajoz and Jaen.

San Blas

San Blas is the Spanish name for Saint Blaise of Sebaste, in modern-day Turkey, who is one of the fourteen holy helpers - those saints whose intercession is/was thought to bring relief from pain and illness. Blas is important for ailments of the throat. In his lifetime he was said to be a pious man who took refuge in a cave and was visited by people and animals whom he cured. These days, on his saint’s day, crossed candles are held over believers and prayers are said for his intercession. Another great miracle: the Saint’s remains are scattered about the world and he seems to have multiplied in death. He was martyred, it is said, by being scraped with iron combs meant for sheep. His skin would have been torn and scratched off. After being beheaded, he became the patron saint of wool combers.

García Noblejas

The name refers to a family of brothers, José, Jesús, Salvador, Javier and Ramón, who fought on Franco’s side in the Civil War. The family suffered horribly during the war, the father and grandfather executed during the early days with none of the brothers living longer than 1942. They were back in the news in 2017 when the then mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, ordered that the street name be changed as it was seen to be celebrating fascist heroes. This order was renounced by a court in 2022 and the name remains.

Gregorio Marañon

“Being liberal is two things,” said Gregorio Marañón y Posadillo, one of the key intellectuals in twentieth-century Spanish thought. “First, being open to understanding with those who think differently, and second, never admitting that the end justifies the means, but the other way around, the means justify the end.” Marañon was a polymath and a medical pioneer, someone who felt the Communist Revolution had hijacked the democratic ideals a group of Republicans had dreamt up in 1930. He was afraid of anyone who didn’t doubt themselves and was inaugurated into five of the eight Spanish Royal Academies. When King Alfonso XIII was deciding how to give up the throne and get out of Spain, the negotiations took place at Gregorio’s house because he was one of the few people who had friends on both sides of the political divide. A dude, really.

Alonso Cano

Alonso had a temper. A proper temper. It was so bad that when he reported coming home one night to find his wife murdered, his house robbed and his servant missing, he was arrested under suspicion of killing his wife and servant. A meticulous painter and sculptor (whose painting teacher had taught Velásquez), when a priest poked a crucifix in his face as he lay dying in 1667, he told him to take it away as it was so badly carved.

Guzman el Bueno

Now this one’s a grisly tale: Alonso Pérez de Guzmán was, way back in 1294, the Lord of Tarifa. He may or may not have been Moroccan, a little detail later tidied up in historical retellings, but back then things were not as cut and dried as they seem now. Tarifa had not long been out of Moorish hands when messengers came to the town to inform Alonso that enemies of the King - in fact, Moorish militias under the command of the King’s treacherous brother - were on their way to Tarifa. Worse, they had Guzmán’s ten year old son Pedro with them. When Guzmán decided to stay loyal to the rightful King, the opposition troops threatened to slit Pedro’s throat. Guzmán famously retorted that they should go ahead - they would only confer eternal infamy on themselves and eternal life on his son. And so they did, decapitating Pedro into the bargain and catapulting his head over the castle walls. Guzmán kept his nerve and was rewarded with the title of “the noble one” which was then conferred on every Duke of Medina Sidonia that followed him.

Francos Rodríguez

José Francos Rodríguez was mayor of Madrid twice in the early nineteenth century. Known for his eloquence, he was also governor of Barcelona in 1913. A big mason, he was a well-known journalist and also owned a Madrid-based paper of the day called the Heraldo de Madrid. He was instrumental in setting up the first national telephone company in 1924. And that’s about it, really.

Antonio Machado

It was Machado who coined the phrase “the two Spains”, and it was he who documented what he saw in his country in the poetry he dedicated himself to from a young age. From early modernist structures, Machado’s poetry softened into more pliant, spiritual reflections which took in the Spanish culture and countryside, the mores and the lesses of life in this country. On the death of Federico García Lorca: “He was seen walking between the rifles, down a long street…to think the crime should be in Granada…his Granada….”

Paco de Lucía

Stunning recent, Paco de Lucía, Spain’s guitar maestro, passed away in 2014. Born Francisco - Paco, from Francisco and Lucía, his mum’s name (Lucia’s Paco, we might say) - it’s a sad fact that most guiris like me probably know his work from Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman by Bryan bloody Adams. Widely accepted as a bone fide genius by the flamenco cognoscenti, the man from Cadíz played with everyone during his time on the planet, leaving behind a body of work which is as evocative as it is masterful. A dude.

Herrera Oría

On his way to being a saint as we speak, Ángel Herrera Oria was the thirteenth of fifteen kids born in Valladolid in 1886. His brothers went off overseas as missionaries or became priests while Ángel went to Jesuit college and became a lawyer. He edited an important Catholic newspaper as the Civil War beckoned, but, during the way, headed to Switzerland where he was ordained into the church. Returning to Spain after the way, he worked his way up the religious pecking order, becoming Bishop of Malaga and later a Cardinal. He died in Madrid in 1968.

Duque de Pastrana

Pedro de Alcántara Álvarez de Toledo y Salm-Salm, the 13th Duke of the Infantado, played in goal for Rayo Vallecano. No, he didn’t. He was a rich soldier who raised his own infantry regiment and rode against revolutionary France for starters. Later he served in the Peninsular War, standing up to Napoleon when Bonaparte revealed plans to put his brother Joseph in charge of Spain, but was beaten in battle with the French. He hung around a bit and cosied up to the royals, getting nicely decorated into the bargain, but finally decided he’d had enough with all the bullshit and rode off to put his feet up, watch Netflix and chill on his country estates. Maybe.

Pio XII

Pope between 1939 and 1958, the Italian Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli didn’t make anyone happy with his “diplomacy” during the Second World War; he played for both sides and his main enemy - perhaps unsurprisingly - was “godless” Communism. Another whose ball has started rolling down the path to sainthood - though it might be impeded by popular sentiment about his wartime actions - he also put into catholic doctrine the dogma the Virgin Mary had ascended bodily into heaven.  

Concha Espina

Concepción Rodríguez-Espina y García-Tagle was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature twenty-five times in twenty-eight years and didn’t win it once. That had to be so annoying. Apart from those bastards, she was widely appreciated, by the reading public - who renamed a town after one of her books - and also by the King, who sent her as his ambassador to South America and the States in 1929. For the last fifteen years of her life she was blind, but that didn’t stop her writing and she dropped dead at 86 in Madrid after revising the second edition of her Complete Works.

Nuñez de Balboa

First documented European to see the Pacific Ocean, this dude. Inspired by the stories of Columbus and the New World, he was one of the many rich but not first sons who headed across the sea to try and make their fortune. Vasco rocked up in Columbia, being shot at by locals with poison-tipped arrows. Slowly he got a foothold there, turning wild and mean, and eventually found himself hacking through the mosquito swamps and bush of modern day Panama, on September 27th, 1513, he climbed a hill alone and saw the great blue. 

Principe de Vergara

“I don’t have any enemies,” said the Most Excellent Joaquín Baldomero Fernández-Espartero y Álvarez de Toro once said. “Because I’ve shot them all.” King Amadeo I, an Italian prince who reigned in Spain for three years between 1870 and 1873, made him Principe de Vergara, a title which died with him. You’d have had to call him Your Highness but if you’d been alive back then you probably would have done anyway, knowing how this son of a cart maker in Seville had come back from the Peninsular Wars a hero and had gone swashbuckling into politics as one of the ‘big swords’. Always popular with the good old ordinary people, there was a minute after the glorious revolution when Joaquo might even have been King himself. But it wasn’t to be. Perhaps better for someone who once said, A Barcelona hay que bombardearla al menos una vez cada 50 años.

Sainz de Baranda

Pedro Casto Sainz de Baranda y Gorriti was the first mayor - or alcalde - of Madrid, and he took up the post in the fear and rubble which followed the French retreat from the capital in 1812. His efforts to shore up the city’s defences and make it governable again got him the title of The Madrid Dictator, but he was voted in as the city’s first mayor in 1820. Madrid at that time was a city in ruins. There were about two hundred thousand inhabitants living on five litres of water a day. Behind the churches were piles of corpses waiting to be buried and the citizens were locked in with them from ten at night in winter and eleven in summer. When the French did return, Pedro was deposed and in came Napoleon’s brother Joseph.

San Cipriano

So which San Cipriano is the station named after? The interesting one or the silly one? The silly one first, because there is a tenuous link with Spain - Calderón de la Barca wrote a play based on his life - is about a sorcerer who is paid to force a woman to fall in love with another man. The sorcerer sends demons but the lady holds strong (thanks to her faith) until finally her faith and the power of Jesus Christ also converts the sorcerer. Or is it the good one - more because it’s interesting - about Cipriano of Carthage in North Africa - a Berber Saint! Who converted late after a wild youth and became so influential he became Bishop of Carthage until he was tried in Rome during a purge of Christians and who replied, in court, when handed the death sentence, “Thanks be to God!”

Reyes Católicos

Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando. Although it was much more complicated than this, when Isabel of Castilla and Fernando of Aragon finally got hitched in 1469, they forcibly began a process which culminated in Spain - or Hispania (Latin) or España (Castellano) becoming what might be called a ‘country’. Ferdinand was Isabel’s cousin and the wedding had been planned since she was six, but they ended up having five children, only three of whom outlived their mother Catherine ended up marrying fat ginger tennis player Henry VIII of England, thus becoming grandmother to the English Queen Mary I. Isabel funded Columbus’ voyage to the New World but she also set up the Inquisition, which murdered wildly, and she and her husband made a show of expelling Jews from Spain too.

Manuel de Falla

Arguably Spain’s most famous composer, Manuel de Falla was a child prodigy who came good on his talent, writing everything from piano pieces to Zarzuelas. Much of his work was tinged with Andalucian influences - he was born in Cadíz and lived for some of his life in Granada. As well as this Metro station, he also had his face on the old 1000 peseta note: so you could say his face has been sat on by the majority of Spanish people in the 1970s and 80s.

Santiago Bernabéu

A little known fact about Santiago Bernabéu who, as well as being really hard to pronounce correctly and being a stadium, also played a game for Atletico Madrid. Other than that, though, he was and still is the blood that flows through the club - his allegiance in the Civil War and its consequences, his emphasis on the team being nothing but the best, in stadiums and players, and his constant innovation. Instrumental in giving birth to what has grown up to be the Champions League, Bernabéu was a football man through and through and it makes sense his presence is still felt in the heart of the city he loved.

Gregorio Marañon

“Being liberal is two things,” said Gregorio Marañón y Posadillo, one of the key intellectuals in twentieth-century Spanish thought. “First, being open to understanding with those who think differently, and second, never admitting that the end justifies the means, but the other way around, the means justify the end.” Marañon was a polymath and a medical pioneer, someone who felt the Communist Revolution had hijacked the democratic ideals a group of Republicans had dreamt up in 1930. He was afraid of anyone who didn’t doubt themselves and was inaugurated into five of the eight Spanish Royal Academies. When King Alfonso XIII was deciding how to give up the throne and get out of Spain, the negotiations took place at Gregorio’s house because he was one of the few people who had friends on both sides of the political divide. A dude, really.

Alonso Martínez

Manuel Alonso Martínez stands as a kind of rock amid the rushing, turbulent waters of history he was standing in. A serious, learned man of letters, Alonso Martínez lives on in the civil code he was instrumental in drawing up which is still in use today. The archetypal lawyer, he was a businessman, father of nine, liberal and friend to royalty whose lifelong battle with bronchitis finally manifested itself in a lung cancer which finished him off. After he died his widow was given a royal title, while Manuel got a Metro station.

Principe Pío

Named after the hill next to it, made famous by Goya’s painting, which was in turn named after the Italian who owned the land, Francisco Pía de Saboya. After taking the right side in the War of Spanish Succession, and being rewarded for it, Francisco drowned, somehow, in the Manzanares, when his carriage was swept into the river in a storm.

Joaquín Vilumbrales

Joaquín Vilumbrales was the mayor of Alcorcón from June to September 1999. That’s really about it. It was a notable act because he represented right wing politics - becoming a Partido Popular mayor - in what was traditionally seen as a working class district. For this achievement he also had a council library named after him. His term in office was cut short by cancer.

San Francisco

Named after an American city with a big red bridge and a prison island - ¡qué no! San Francisco is, of course, Saint Francis of Assisi who everyone knows. The original Doctor Doolittle, St Francis, baptised Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, was the archetypal saint/religious figure who was coarse and rich and vulgar as a young man but who, upon experiencing a mystic vision, changed his life and inspired others to change. “The only thing ever achieved in life without effort is failure,” he said, which is not one hundred percent true, but good if you’re training for a marathon. “A single sunbeam,” is also said, “is enough to drive away the shadows.” Which, if you can forgive him for ripping off George Harrison, is nice. He also started the trend for stigmata. “Suddenly he saw a vision of a seraph, a six-winged angel on a cross,” said his friend Brother Leo. “This angel gave him the gift of the five wounds of Christ."

San Nicasio

A French saint who prophesied the Vandal invasion of Gaul, Saint Nicasius of Reims is the patron saint of smallpox victims and also one of the patron saints of Getafe. He’s a “head carrier”, or one of the cephalophores, which comes from the fact that when he was beheaded his bonce - well, his mouth, really - continued to recite the psalms he’d been reading aloud as he was executed.

Hospital Severo Ochoa

The Asturian Severo Ochoa de Albornoz - whose first name was not Hospital, sadly - won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Arthur Kornberg for their discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid” - or what we know as DNA. After sparkling intellectually during his early years, he and his wife left Spain during the Civil War, travelling to England where he fell in love with Everton F.C.. Although he eventually ended up in the United States - watching Blues matches half-blotto in Irish pubs - he did manage to find time to squeeze an illicit affair in with the actress Sara Montiel before dying in Madrid in 1993. Although he’s worm food in the ground these days, an asteroid bearing his name forever streaks through the heavens above the similarly named hospital and Metro station.

Julian Besteiro

Internationally-educated, Madrid-born Julián Besteiro Fernández was another who paid the price for their beliefs, dying in an Andalusian cell in 1940 after being sentenced to thirty years imprisonment after being caught by Franciost forces. Before that, Besteiro had been a lecturer and trade union man, playing high-up roles in various governments before the chaos of war washed him away.

Juan de la Cierva

The skeleton of this man’s life was aviation. He was the father, for want of a better word, of the modern helicopter, and he also had a hand in procuring the De Havilland DH-89 'Dragon Rapide' which flew Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco to begin the Spanish Civil War. A Nationalist from a Nationalist family, his brother lies buried near the large white cross you can see when you travel to and from Barajas - or Adolfo Suarez Airport - which is not a warning from the gods but a monument to many like de la Cierva who were massacred there by Republicans during the war. In a final footnote, Juan himself was killed when, in 1936, the DC-2 he took off in heavy fog from Croydon Airport crashed into a house.

Alonso de Mendoza

A conquistador, Mendoza founded La Paz - or Nuestra Señora de La Paz - in Bolivia on 20 October 1548. This came at the culmination of a long life, first as a soldier in Europe, and then achieving his ambition of making his name in the New World, serving under Hernán Cortés, Pizarra and even ‘The Demon of The Andes’, Francisco de Carvajal.

Manuela Malasaña

Eighteen hours after the uprising against occupying French forces in what is now known as the Plaza Dos De Mayo, Manuela Malasaña - a seventeen year old seamstress, son of a baker, was killed by French troops as she walked home. She was the seventy-fourth of four hundred and nine people killed by troops that day. Her youth and vigour for the cause - she was variously said to have supplied her dad with gunpowder to shoot the French from their balcony, or actually served in the military or militias - made her, in death, a heroine. These days an entire boozy barrio of Madrid is dedicated to her name, as well as this Metro. Cheers to Manuela!