official neighbourhood of Embajadores

El Rastro

From the rastro —⁠the trail of blood⁠— left by the cattle dragged from the municipal slaughterhouse, installed here in the sixteenth century, toward the tanneries of the Ribera de Curtidores. From the tanners and the leather was born the Sunday market that still bears the name. Officially, the neighborhood of Embajadores.

It belongs to the neighborhood of Embajadores, but nobody calls it that: they know it by the rastro, the trail of blood left by the cattle dragged from the slaughterhouse to the tanneries of the Ribera de Curtidores. The slope lived off leather. Tanners and halter-makers, packsaddlers and cobblers worked the hide on the way to the river, and this way passed the ram and the bear on their way to the slaughter. Between one workshop and the next, Sunday by Sunday, a market grew up where in the end everything came to be sold. Today you come down on a Sunday from Cascorro to Toledo, stall by stall. You haggle over the bargain, you try your luck with the bladeless sword and the key without a door, and you ask the price of what nobody needs. Of the leather nothing remains; of the market, everything.

Streets

Part of the official neighbourhood of Embajadores —the part Madrid knows as El Rastro—, street by street.