Calle de Belén

For centuries, what is now a single street was two lanes with separate lives. Calle de Belén begins at Pelayo and ends at the Barquillo, with a short, broken layout that betrays its double past: the street-name reform of 1835 erased the boundary and joined the two halves under the name the lower part already bore. Behind Belén stands a woman: Beatriz Ramírez de Mendoza, Countess of Castellar, one of the great religious patrons of Madrid under Philip III. Beside an estate of hers she had a chapel built to the Virgin of Bethlehem. Every Christmas the hermitage filled with the neighborhood’s poor for a pilgrimage where alms were handed out. When the chapel was torn down, the image set off for Castellar de la Frontera, the domain tied to the title, and years later returned to Madrid. The street never held distinctive trades or grand buildings, but it keeps in its name the memory of a devout countess and a Christmas pilgrimage.