Calle de Amaniel

Conde Duque·Universidad

The name goes back to Don Lope de Amaniel, chief keeper and crossbowman to King Henry II of Castile (second half of the 14th century), who was charged with guarding the vast oak woods stretching from Moncloa to the Valnegral stream. The wood took his surname and passed it on to the Dehesa y Eras de Amaniel, to the Amaniel water conduit (1614–1616) and, once the urban fabric took shape under Philip IV, to this street. On Texeira’s map (1656) the street is labelled calle de Gumiel, a name that did not last. Amaniel is the only trace left in the street map of that royal hunting reserve.

Before the street existed, the water did. Between 1614 and 1616 the Viaje de Amaniel was dug, an underground gallery that gathered water in the old common land and carried it to the Royal Alcázar. That conduit fixed the place’s name in the city’s memory long before calle de Amaniel inherited it. The land had been a crown oak wood that Alfonso VII gave to the town in 1152 to reward its loyalty. Of those 900 hectares of forest, only the Dehesa de la Villa survives today. The street drops from calle del Conde Duque to plaza del Conde de Toreno, and its narrow, crooked line betrays that it was born before any map, when the old wood was parcelled out under Philip IV. Over the centuries it took in institutions of every kind: the church of the Comendadoras de Santiago, sponsored by Philip IV in 1650; the Professional Conservatory of Music in a former Jesuit novitiate; and at numbers 29–31, the first Mahou brewery, in neo-Mudéjar brick, whose original chimney still rises above the rooftops of the quarter.

Its names

  • Calle de Gumielc. 1656
  • Calle de Amaniel17th century (consolidado bajo Felipe 4th)
Sources (10)

Crossings