Calle del Barquillo

Calle del Barquillo runs its 650 meters down from Alcalá to Fernando VI, in the Justicia neighborhood, along the trace of an old road that crossed the lands of Vicálvaro when all of it was still the outskirts of Madrid. The firmest hypothesis about its name speaks of a long, concave hollow that recalled the silhouette of a barquillo, a small boat. The street began to take on the body of a city in the seventeenth century, as the way to the convent of San Hermenegildo, where in 1614 a young priest named Lope de Vega sang his first mass. The eighteenth century raised it from an outlying district to a street of the crown: Barbara of Braganza founded the Monastery of the Salesas Reales in 1748, and the street came to be called the Real calle del Barquillo. In its lower stretch, artisan blacksmiths — the chisperos, famous for their brawls with the manolos of Lavapiés — lived alongside the mansions of the nobility. The second half of the twentieth century gave it another nickname, “the Street of Sound”: more than twenty shops selling instruments were once crammed into those 650 meters. In 1979, one of its shopkeepers commissioned a sign that mimicked the official plaques, as if the nickname were true nomenclature.

In 1791, Ramón de la Cruz published the sainete “La Petra y la Juana, o El casero prudente, o La casa de Tócame Roque”, based on the tenement block that occupied the corner of Barquillo and Belén. The building owed its name to two brothers, Juan and Roque, whose inheritance had been drawn up with such ambiguity that neither could prove his ownership. The dispute gave rise to a repeated exchange — “touch me” / “no, touch me, Juan” — that became proverbial in the neighborhood. The tenement housed 72 families and 70 blacksmiths working in its courtyards; it was demolished by municipal decree in 1849. The expression “casa de tócame roque” entered the dictionary of the Real Academia Española as a synonym for a noisy, disorderly place.