Calle Mayor

The word “mayor” here means “main.” The name was literal: the street led from Puerta del Sol, through the commercial center of old Madrid, to the royal residence. Court outings and ceremonial processions passed along it. On May thirty-first, nineteen oh six, the predictability of this route helped prepare an assassination attempt.

King Alfonso XIII and his new wife, Victoria Eugenia, had just been married at the Church of St. Jerome and were returning to the palace. The anarchist Mateo Morral wanted to kill the newlyweds and strike at the monarchy. He came from the family of a textile-factory owner, where he was being prepared to manage the business. After breaking with his father, Morral worked as a translator and librarian at Barcelona’s Modern School, which spread anarchist ideas.

In Madrid, he rented a room with a balcony in house number eighty-eight—now number eighty-four. From the window, the final stretch of the wedding route before the palace was visible. Morral paid for the lodging two weeks in advance. After the assassination attempt, a map of Madrid was found in the room: the royal procession’s route had been marked on it in pencil.

When the carriage drew level with the house, Morral threw a bouquet of flowers down from above. A bomb was inside it. The bouquet struck a tram-line wire and changed direction, so the charge exploded beside the carriage rather than inside it. Alfonso and Victoria Eugenia survived. Twenty-three people were killed, and around one hundred were injured. A fragment pierced the carriage and lodged in the seat; the bride’s dress and shoes were covered in blood. The couple were transferred to a spare carriage and continued on to the palace.

Morral managed to leave the house. Two days later, near Torrejón de Ardoz, he was recognized by the watchman Fructuoso Vega. The fugitive shot Vega, and soon afterward he himself died from a gunshot. Officially, his death was declared a suicide, although later researchers disputed this version. Morral did not live to stand trial.

House number eighty-four has survived. Opposite it, by number seventy-nine, stands a bronze kneeling angel—a monument to the victims, installed in nineteen sixty-three. The scroll in its hands bears two years: nineteen oh six and nineteen sixty-three. The tram wire that diverted the bomb away from the carriage is no longer above the street.