Calle de Carretas

Calle de Carretas owes its name to a trade that filled its pavements with noise and timber. Since the sixteenth century the carts that supplied the centre on their way to Atocha entered and manoeuvred here, and in its workshops worked the broqueleros, who carved the small wooden bucklers a man used to shield himself in a brawl. The street begins at the Puerta del Sol and drops 224 metres to the plaza de Jacinto Benavente. Its character was always commercial: after the buckler-makers came the booksellers, and in the late eighteenth century the Royal Printing House of the Gazeta and the House of the Philippines Company. In 1834 it opened, along with the Montera, Madrid’s first stone pavements with kerbs. In the late nineteenth century it turned to variety theatre with the Teatro Romea (1892), and at number 4 stood the Café Pombo, where Ramón Gómez de la Serna presided over his gatherings of “La Sagrada Cripta” between 1915 and 1936. It was pedestrianised in November 2018.