Calle de Calatrava

A street linking Toledo with the plaza de San Francisco, in the heart of Los Austrias, the district many call La Latina. Before 1492 this land belonged to Mosén Romano, chief accountant of Castile; the expulsion edict of the Catholic Monarchs left his heirs with nothing, and the vacant property was bought by don Luis Monroy de Calatrava, who built his houses here. In his private oratory he kept an image of Christ the neighbourhood held to be miraculous. On his death, Monroy left it to the convent of Las Maravillas, and from there it took the name Cristo de las Maravillas; today it remains in the parish of San Andrés. The City Council did not unify the name of the whole street until 1932. In the seventeenth century the painter Claudio Coello lived and died here, and in his house grew up Teodoro Ardemans, future Master of Works to Philip V. During the nineteenth century Calatrava pulsed as the district’s commercial, traditional artery: haberdasheries, taverns, dance halls, a five-hundred-seat cinema, and the Fiesta de la Paloma poured into its August street fairs.