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.