Calle de Covarrubias

The surname behind this street belongs to Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva, born in Toledo in 1512 and died in Madrid in 1577. He studied in Salamanca, where he won a chair before turning thirty, and was later a judge in the Chancery of Granada. Bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo and archbishop of Segovia, he played a weighty part in the Council of Trent and sided with those who condemned the enslavement of the native peoples of America. His contemporaries nicknamed him “the Spanish Bartolus” and held him to be one of the foremost jurists of his time. Before the bourgeois expansion laid out these blocks, the spot was known as “campo del tío Mereje,” a rustic name that clashes with the well-to-do houses now lining the pavement. The street runs between Sagasta and Luchana, in the heart of Trafalgar, over what for centuries were open lands north of Madrid.