Calle Caravaca

The land of calle Caravaca, between Lavapiés and Mesón de Paredes, was part of Cardinal Zapata’s estate. It does not appear on Texeira’s 1656 map: only in the 18th century was the plot built up and a name born. That name comes from a wayside shrine, a small street chapel that held a cross with a double horizontal crossbar, the Caravaca cross. It drew considerable devotion; Répide records that ladies had themselves carried there to kneel before it. A fire destroyed the chapel, but its memory survived in the flower crosses that adorned the neighbourhood’s doors each May, the seed of the Cruz de Mayo festivals. When the street was built up it was named “de la Cruz de Caravaca”. Since 1835 the name has been simply Caravaca.

The neighborhood’s “majas” turned the street into the setting for the festival of the May Cross: they set up altars of flowers in front of their doors and asked passersby for money. The practice grew so much that the Sala de Alcaldes de Corte had to legislate against its excesses in 1769. The mayor José Abascal suppressed it definitively at the end of the nineteenth century, and it was not revived until 1988 through a residents' initiative.