Calle de Carranza

The street recalls Bartolomé de Carranza, a Dominican friar born in Miranda de Arga (Navarre) in 1503, archbishop of Toledo and confessor to Charles I. His catechism, published in 1558, earned him a charge of Lutheranism and an Inquisition trial that dragged on for seventeen years between prisons in Spain and Rome. He died in 1576, shortly after recanting the propositions imputed to him, without fully recovering his good name. The street is relatively modern. It was born after the demolition of the wall that girded Madrid, when that ring of ramparts gave way to the ring roads. It was earlier known as paseo de Entrepuertas and as part of the ronda de Bilbao. The choice of the archbishop was not by chance: he was honored as an innocent felled by the Inquisition near today’s glorieta de Ruiz Jiménez, where the Holy Office’s burning ground once stood.