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The Salamanca District of Madrid

The Salamanca district is one of twenty-one Madrid districts. Situated near the center of the city, it includes the neighborhoods of Recoletos, Goya, Lista, Castellana, Fuente de Berro, and Guindalera. The first four neighborhoods include the part of Madrid’s extension that José de Salamanca y Mayol began to urbanize in the 1860’s because he thought the land, east of the paseos (avenues) of Recoletos and la Castellana, was well located and salutary.

Salamanca built 130 apartment buildings and eighteen single-family dwellings (hoteles) in the area he called New Madrid. He originally intended to follow the guidelines in Plan Castro (1860), which called for blocks open in the center and buildings of no more than four stories. Although pressure for profits led to more intensive construction, the district was developed attractively.

The first apartment buildings had four floors and interior patios with gardens and coach houses. The ground floor was designed as a semibasement for service activities; in later years, this floor became a location for luxury retailers. The two floors above the ground floor had two apartments, one facing the street and the other the patio. The attic was for servants and employees. Facades were plastered with decorative moldings and ironwork balconies, presenting a uniform exterior.

Salamanca intended the hoteles for the high bourgeoisie who could not afford palaces. There were two orders of hoteles with different price levels. The first order had more and larger rooms and was slightly taller. However, all the homes had a semibasement, a ground floor, two living floors, and an attic. The semibasement was designed for service workers; the ground floor featured the dining room, drawing room, and study or library; the two living floors contained bedrooms and a dressing room; the attic was the site of the servants’ bedrooms. The additional rooms of the first-order homes included a billiards room and an office on the ground floor and a bathroom on the second living floor; these homes also had a service stairway and a cupola. The exteriors of the two orders of homes were similar except for the doorways, windows, and decorative moldings.

After the initial construction, laws were passed that permitted less space in the interior patios and allowed buildings of five stories and higher. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century the older neighborhoods of the Salamanca district continued to be divided into the original grid of right-angled streets and still contained some of the most expensive residences in Madrid. The mansions or palaces there have typically been converted into embassies, museums, swank hotels, or offices. The existing architecture is more diverse than it was in the nineteenth century and includes some twentieth century styles. However, municipal laws protect many of the old buildings and the most popular style in the early twenty-first century was neoclassical.

Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy

José de Salamanca y Mayol

by Steven L. Driever

Spanish banker, railroad builder, real estate developer, and politician

Salamanca was one of the wealthiest persons in nineteenth century Spain. He was a pioneer in building railroads and took on projects that combined profits with public service and national development. He maintained an extravagant lifestyle, but much of his spending supported the arts in Spain.

Sources of wealth: Banking; railroads; real estate; investments

Bequeathal of wealth: Dissipated

Early Life

José de Salamanca y Mayol (ho-ZAY day sahl-ah-MAHN-kah ee mah-YOL) was born on May 23, 1811, in Málaga, Spain. His father, José María Salamanca, was from the town of Utrera, southeast of Seville, and was an important doctor. His mother, María Polonia Mayol, was a native of Málaga. In 1825, the young Salamanca received a scholarship to study philosophy at the Colegio de Santiago in Granada and then law at the University of Granada. At this time he got involved in liberal politics against the regime of King Ferdinand VII, but he was able to finish his law studies in 1829.

Through his father’s political connections, Salamanca became magistrate of Monóvar. His notable achievements there earned him an appointment in 1835 as magistrate of Vera. That year, Salamanca married Petronila Livermore Salas, daughter of an English businessman in Málaga, and he was chosen to represent Almería Province in the revolutionary junta (assembly) of Seville. In 1836, he was elected a diputado (deputy) to the Cortes en las Constituyentes (Constituent Parliament), although when he arrived in Madrid he had to wait another year to assume the seat because of his young age.

First Ventures

Salamanca showed an early proclivity for mixing politics and business. In 1841, he persuaded the minister of finance to lease the salt monopoly to him for twice the amount it was earning for Spain. During the five-year lease, Salamanca’s profits exceeded 300 million reales, allowing him to move into a large house, which he always kept open to artists and writers whom he feted with fine food, French wines, and Cuban cigars. In the same year he was sent to London to try to reduce Spain’s debt; he succeeded in getting the interest rate lowered from 5 to 3 percent. This deal cemented his reputation as a premier financier. In the 1840’s, he started speculating in the Madrid stock market, but its small size and undercapitalization meant that huge returns were often followed by large losses.

Mature Wealth

Temporarily renouncing the stock market, Salamanca returned to business. In 1844, he was the leading cofounder of the Banco de Castilla (Bank of Castile), which later became the Banco de Isabel II and then merged with the Banco de San Fernando (now the Banco de España). After traveling abroad to study railroads, Salamanca started the construction of a rail line between Madrid and Aranjuez in 1845. In the same year he formed the Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España, a company that built railroads in northern Spain, with funds from Spanish and British investors. These ventures required government support at a high level, which led him in 1847 to accept the post of minister of finance with backing from the left wing of the Partido Moderado, one of the country’s political parties. The party’s conservatives put him on trial in the Congreso de los Diputados (Congress of Deputies) in January, 1848, for using his post for personal gain. Fearing prison, Salamanca fled to Bayonne, France, in March. In May, 1849, a Madrid court declared Salamanca bankrupt.

Returning to Spain in May thanks to a general amnesty for political exiles, Salamanca sought to restore his fortune. He obtained an extension of his concession for the Madrid-Aranjuez rail line and managed to get the declaration of bankruptcy removed. When the Madrid-Aranjuez line was inaugurated in 1851, his reputation was restored. He quickly sold the concession to the city of Aranjuez for 60 million reales, leased the line back from the city, and used the remaining funds to win new concessions all the way to Alicante by 1858. The Aranjuez-Alicante line was sold to French parties, including the Rothschilds, for 135 million reales. With that capital and his earnings from continued speculation on the Madrid stock exchange, Salamanca built other railroads in Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, the Danubian principalities (now Romania), and the United States, where he was an investor in the Atlantic and Great Western Railway and Salamanca, New York, the railway’s eastern terminus, which is named in his honor. By 1854 his fortune exceeded the one he had lost while in exile.

In the early 1850’s Salamanca assumed an even more extravagant lifestyle. He moved into a palace that occupied nearly an entire block and filled this mansion with an extraordinary collection of fine art and antiques. He also rebuilt the Circo de Paul, a theater that had burned down, and made it a favorite destination for Madrilenians wishing to watch opera or ballet. Once again, however, Salamanca had to flee to France, this time to escape the fury of the revolution of 1854, during which rioters destroyed his home.

Returning in 1856 to a calmer Spain, Salamanca resumed his ventures. The late 1850’s and early 1860’s marked the apogee of his wealth. Around 1856 he assembled the lands in Albacete that were to comprise the great estate called los Llanos. In 1858 he completed construction of the Palace of Recoletos and founded the Banco Hipotecario, a mortgage bank. In 1859 he bought for 2.5 million reales the Palace of Vista Alegre, which had been built by Queen Maria Cristina and King Ferdinand VII. In addition, he owned houses in Paris, Rome, Lisbon, and London. By 1863 his wealth totaled 400 million reales. That year, Queen Isabel II gave him the title marqués de (marquis of) Salamanca and made him a senator for life. The following year she added the title of conde (count) de los Llanos to his laurels; this honor made him a grandee of Spain.

The undertaking that most people associate with his name—development of the Salamanca district of Madrid—was the beginning of his ruin. In 1860, the Plan Castro for the extension of Madrid was approved by royal decree. Salamanca was the first to dare to profit by implementing the plan. Rents in Madrid were soaring because there was insufficient housing, and Salamanca was aware that in England and the United States real estate development had yielded great fortunes. Salamanca decided to buy agricultural land in the northeast sector of the approved extension, urbanize it, and watch its value soar. Failing to win financial backing in London and Paris, he undertook the urbanization at his own expense. Because real estate prices began to fall and interest rates, at 18 percent, were high, he had to sell the buildings at a loss.

The declining real estate values, stock market losses, and the death of his wife Petronila in 1866 damaged Salamanca’s self-confidence. He sold off his best artworks in Paris in 1868 and more pieces of art and his library in another auction there in 1875. To reduce exposure to his real estate holdings, in 1873 he formed a limited liability company for the Salamanca district, Compañía de Inmuebles del Barrio de Salamanca, which reduced his debt to 35 million pesetas; however, this company soon failed. He then he sold the Palace of Recoletos to the Banco Hipotecario in 1876 and planned to move in with his adopted daughter, María Josefa, who resided in a single-family dwelling in the Salamanca district.

Salamanca undertook two final projects to turn his fortunes around. In 1879 he started constructing the Duero Canal to provide the city of Valladolid with water, but creditors took over the project. Then, envisioning the resort potential of San Sebastián, a city on Spain’s north coast, he hired more than one thousand men to reclaim swampy land along the mouth of the Urumea River. Some 52,000 square meters of land were reclaimed, but Salamanca worked so hard he contracted pneumonia. He rushed home to his Palace of Vista Alegre and died on January 21, 1883, leaving almost no estate to his two grown children María and Fernando.

Legacy

Spain in the twenty-first century is a richer country because of Salamanca’s energy and foresight. He envisioned and constructed some of the most well-traveled rail lines in Spain. His real estate investment in the Salamanca district was the catalyst for the creation of the finest residential area in central Madrid. The first to make mortgages available in Spain, he expanded home ownership. As the premier representative of a new money aristocracy in nineteenth century Spain, he assumed spendthrift habits, but he was also very generous in his support of the arts.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Driever, Steven L. "José De Salamanca Y Mayol." Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy, edited by Howard Bromberg, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLIW_1355369001355.

APA 7th

Driever, S. L. (2010). José de Salamanca y Mayol. In H. Bromberg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Driever, Steven L. "José De Salamanca Y Mayol." Edited by Howard Bromberg. Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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