Madrid to Carabanchel - a novel tour

 My Fulbright year officially ended on June 14, and the blog is sadly winding to an end, but here's a little story of one of my final activities....

Faithful blog readers will recall my long winter's silence when I was trying to finish a novel as well as working on my thesis. A few of you have read or heard more about this project, so I thought it would be nice, as one of the final entries, to do a little tour of how important places in the novel look in the present day. So this will be an entry of photos, not so much about my daily life as about the places I wrote about (more or less), although I give fair warning that the neighborhood has changed so much in the last fifty years (and even the last twenty-five) that almost nothing remains of 1876, when the novel is set, and when Carbanchel was a country village outside a much smaller Madrid, that still stayed more or less inside its gates.

For those of you who haven't read or heard about the novel, it takes place in 1876, and is partly inspired by the construction of the (now defunct) tram line between Madrid and the village of Los Carabancheles (Carabanchel Alto and Carabanchel Bajo), which were in those days summer resorts, filled with the villas of Madrid's wealthy who went into the “mountains” to escape the summer heat. (Note: Without air conditioning this does not work in Carabanchel. It's still pretty hot. But hope springs eternal.)

The tram line (according to Wikipedia, which is usually reliable about fairly obscure facts as opposed to its dubious record with more famous and thus controversial ones) ran more or less along the line of the current number 35 bus, which officially runs from the Plaza Mayor to Carabanchel Alto (actually far out to the M-40 and vacant fields and the truly enormous and slightly disturbing IslAzul shopping center – I know because I took it from end to end last Saturday before my tarjeta multi for the month expired, to verify the route). In fact, all the action of the novel takes place much closer to the city, but I thought I would more or less start at the Plaza Mayor and put in photos of places mentioned in the novel.

So here's the first one, taken from the Calle de Toledo just below the Plaza Mayor, looking toward what is now the Museo de Orígenes, or Museo San Isidro, home to a seventeenth century palacete belonging to the Vargas, the noble family who (allegedly) held San Isidro and his wife as serfs.

Here's a shot looking up the Calle de Toledo to the Plaza Mayor.  

This is pure city center, as you can see.  If you continue along the Calle de Toledo you reach the Plaza de la Cebada (once a famous fountain, and now a cultural center and market), and before that the site of the former convent of "La Latina" (Beatriz Galindo), pictured at left (from bus window).

Further on you reach the column raised to the honor of Fernando VII “el deseado” after the French were defeated. The column dates from about 1820, and therefore styles the king “Duque de Montezuma” among other things, since of course he'd just managed to lose not only Mexico but all of South America. The main characters in the novel would doubtless have opinions about the column, which would be a sprightly 50-60 years old in the novel.  I regret not taking a picture of it.  (I will try to update the blog and get a picture in a few weeks.)

Then we reach the official edge of the city, the triumphal arch (again from the reign of Fernando VII) of the Puerta de Toledo. I must admit to a sneaking fondness for the view from the Puerta de Toledo looking down to the river from what is actually a fairly steep slope (and was probably steeper before the city expanded and filled in the streets to make them relatively speaking more level, though it's only very relative if you're on a bicycle and trying to climb them, believe me.)

Once you go through the gates that marked the old city it's a straight slope down to the river...and up the river to Carabanchel

I've doubtless included the puente de Toledo in many blog entries previously, not least those about Madrid Río, because it's such a beautiful landmark, and because reaching it gives me the same comforting sensation that crossing from Brooklyn or Queens into Manhattan gives me: once I get across the bridge I'm home.

Roses in bloom under the Puente de Toledo in Madrid Río

Detail of the statues on the Puente de Toledo at sunset.  I believe that's Santa María de la Cabeza, as the novel's characters would have known the statue.

Crossing the bridge (which is now pedestrian, so the bus takes a modern one nearby, or a tunnel under the river depending on direction), you reach what is now the plaza de Marqués de Vadillo, but what was I think open country in the time of the novel, and begin to climb the long slope up from the river along what is now the Calle General Ricardos, a modern shopping street with no particular character.  A network of side streets rises on either side of General Ricardos, and on one of them (the Calle Comandante Fontanes) you find the British Cemetery, "God's Acre" as the nineteenth century guidebooks picturesquely call it.  In operation during the time of the novel, one of the novel's minor characters, George Fitch, is buried there, along with a number of people whom the novel's main characters might have encountered in life.

The entrance to the British Cemetery, founded in 1853

One of the cemetery's feline guardians, patrolling the wall, and practicing for Halloween

A not atypical memorial, to a fellow New Yorker.

Since the cemetery was the only place to bury non-Catholics in nineteenth century Madrid, it contains an interesting set of graves, of a number of German protestants, several German Jews, and an interesting collection of Greek and Russian Orthodox memorials, the latter being frequently people born shortly before the Russian Revolution, who obviously left the country as children, and settled in Spain as a congenial environment for anti-Communists after the Civil War.  (Some of them faithfully record their titles of nobility.)  All in all, as the cemetery's current caretaker David Butler (whom I was fortunate enough to meet on a visit there) told me, it is probably just as well that the Spanish authorities in 1853 prohibited the placement of a cross over the entrance, since they considered it a non-Christian burial ground.  While the Anglicans who ostensibly built the place might have liked a cross, they ended up offering hospitality of sorts to quite a lot of people who are just as happy that it isn't there.

Leaving behind the cemetery and continuing up General Ricardos one comes to the Calle Clarisas, home to the Convento de las Clarisas, another one of the few buildings that the characters in the novel might have seen, and then past the remains of the Palacio de Vista Alegre, which the characters briefly refer to.  (The grounds of the former Palacio are alas not open to the public, as they are currently chopped up into a senior center, a conservatory, and a reform school, so one can only see the blank walls, which are not very picturesque, and a few nineteenth century buildings peeking over them.)

The bus in fact bypasses the singularly pretty Plaza de Carabanchel, with it's church of San Sebastian, which has been recently renovated.  (You still can't go inside, because the interior renovations are ongoing, but the outside is newly restored and pretty, as of this Spring.  When I visited in winter it was still under scaffolding.

Plaza de Carabanchel - 16th Century Church of San Sebastian on the left, late nineteenth century Ayuntamiento on the right.  (The Ayuntamiento is from after the novel is set, alas.)

 The Plaza de Carabanchel is amusing partly because it fits so exactly with plazas I know in Puerto Rico, and I suspect would be recognizable to anyone who has been in a pueblo anywhere in South America or the Philippines as well as anywhere else in Spain: A tree-lined spot with benches and perhaps the odd sculpture, enclosed by (a)ayuntamiento, and (b) church, usually sitting perpendicular to each other.  The other two sides of the plaza are made up by (c) police station (in this case the policía nacional, not pictured, since they're touchy about people taking photos of their installations sometimes), and (d) banks or important businesses.  Also not pictured, because it's in a building clearly built in the last thirty years and not of particular beauty or interest is the inevitable bakery (just past the ayuntamiento to the right of the photo) and bank.  So while the buildings on the plaza are modern, given the Spanish plaza model has been fundamentally unchanged since the sixteenth century, I'm pretty sure that the plaza in the novel had not only the same shape but the predecessors of the same set of buildings even though the church is the only one that has not been ripped down and rebuilt from scratch.

Detail of the newly restored churhc of San Sebastian, on the Plaza de Carabanchel

Running at right angles to the Calle General Ricardos (which really bypasses the plaza and is parallel to it), you can walk from the plaza up the hill to the church of Santa María la Antigua, which I've blogged about before, and which is technically part of the same parish at the moment.

The Romanesque (13th Century) Santa María la Antigua, with attached little grave yard, if you've forgotten what it looks like.

The street between Santa María and San Sebastián down in the plaza is currently named Calle Monseñor Oscar Romero, a defiant nod to Madrid's sympathy with liberation theology which obviously dates from the last thirty years, after the murder of Archbishop Romero.  (One assumes the street will become the Blessed Oscar Romero when he is canonized later this year.)  In any case, the houses and polideportivo ("Las Minas") along it are all modern, hence the lack of photographs, but it seems logical to me that the path, presumably unpaved, would have existed between the village and the "ermita" (hermitage) of Santa María during the time of the novel.

This is about as far as the novel goes, since I know there were large tracts of wilderness in the area as recently as fifty years ago, never mind one hundred.  However, in the interests of thoroughness (and using up my bus pass), I rode the number 35 bus to the very end of the line, which is labeled as Carbanchel Alto, and is out by the M-40, the highway which runs between Portugal and the Mediterranean to the south of the city.  I disembarked there at the gigantic IslAzul shopping center, and wandered around in the air conditioning to recover from nearly fainting because the air conditioning wasn't working on the bus and it was about 35/95 degrees.  Then I took another bus home, which looped around the Palacio Vista Alegre grounds on the far side of General Ricardos, before winding its way back to the main road.

There is nothing picturesque or fashionable about the neighborhoods through which these buses pass, and the buildings are all recent and cramped with apartments and little local businesses which are pleasant, but give little sense of Madrid's wilderness.  (For that you have to go further out of the city nowadays.)  But the old buildings pictured here provide an outline for what must have been a country village, with links (via tram) to the metropolis on the other side of the river and the Puerta de Toledo.  As I told friends who visited me here and whom I insisted on dragging to the Plaza de Carabanchel, I love my neighborhood, and think it's a shame that most people in Madrid react to it by thinking only of Franco's now defunct prison (it's like saying you come from Sing-Sing), and most foreigners have never heard of it at all.  Fingers crossed that the novel both gets published and enjoys enough success to make people say "Oh, Carabanchel.  That's where the novel takes place," which is a far more positive association.  Hurray for Carabanchel.