Calle de Caños del Peral

Ópera·Palacio

The street takes its name from the Fuente de los Caños del Peral, a water source that from the thirteenth century occupied the ravine at the end of the calle del Arenal. “Caños” refers to the fountain’s spouts; “del Peral” (pear tree) points to the tree that, by tradition documented since 1263, shaded the spring. The exact identity of those spouts is disputed: Peñasco and Cambronero attribute them to the pear tree, while Répide suggests they may have been two spouts by the Balnadú gate that fed some Arab baths.

A street named for the old fountain that for over three centuries presided over the corner with the Arenal. It descends between the costanilla de los Ángeles and the plaza de Isabel II, in the Palacio district, and bears the name of those spouts. The water goes back to 1263, when Alfonso X granted the town a privilege over land that had earlier been Arab baths, beside the Christian gate of Balnadú. Around 1569, Juan Bautista de Toledo, first architect of El Escorial, gave it its final form: a front of rusticated ashlar over thirty metres long, with six spouts in niches. A washing place of fifty-seven basins was later added. That corner ended up overshadowed by the Teatro de los Caños del Peral, the great stage of Italian opera in eighteenth-century Madrid, which Philip V ordered rebuilt in 1738 and which was demolished in 1818 to make way for the Teatro Real. When the square was levelled, the fountain was buried under ten metres of earth; it reappeared during the metro works and since 2011 can be visited in the underground museum of the Ópera station. Madrileños nicknamed it Arrastraculos, for the steep slope of the stretch.

Its names

  • Hontanillas / Fontanillas15th century
  • Fuentes del Arrabal15th-16th centuries
  • De los Caños16th-17th centuries
  • Calle de los Caños del Peral17th century - actualidad
Sources (10)

Crossings