Calle de Coloreros

A short pedestrian alley links the calle Mayor with the little square of San Ginés, in the Sol district. It belongs to the network of guild streets that organised the San Ginés suburb from the Middle Ages, where each stretch bore the name of the trade worked there: Bordadores, Hileras, Herradores, Coloreros. The name comes from a curious trade. The coloreros sold dye tablets, with which people changed the colour of their cloth at home, above all their silk stockings, whose tone had to be refreshed now and then. Before the dyers, the shoemakers held sway here: the street had been called Zapateros de San Ginés. It was Galdós who made it a setting: he opened El Grande Oriente (1876) on this street, in a house where onlookers stood watching little coloured fish swimming in wooden tanks, beside cages of crickets. That picturesque shop flourished long after the coloreros, who gave the street its name, had vanished entirely.

Benito Pérez Galdós opens his national episode El Grande Oriente (1876) by setting the scene on this street: “it was on Calle de Coloreros, on that dark lane that opens a way from Calle Mayor to the little square and arch of San Ginés [...] in the very house where today the astonished public admires a fabulous quantity of little colored fish in wooden ponds, and fine samples of a most important industry: cricket cages.”