Calle de Grafal

Before it was called Grafal, this street in Habsburg Madrid carried a name that was a public sentence: calle del Azotado (Street of the Flogged Man). It runs from calle de los Tintoreros to the Cava Alta, and behind the nickname was a real man, Hernán Carnicero. Carnicero harassed a neighbour relentlessly until the courts sentenced him to public flogging, part of it carried out in front of his own house. The stain proved indelible: no one would buy a flogged man’s home, and the story goes that, in desperation, Carnicero set fire to it, with such bad luck that the blaze leapt to the neighbouring houses. The second name came from a very different resident: Antonio de Heredia y Bazán, magistrate of the town and consort Marquis of Rafal, whose title the register took up in 1821. But the spelling played a trick on him. Passing from mouth to mouth, that Rafal gained an initial G and fixed itself forever as Grafal. The name the tourist reads today springs, at bottom, from a copying error.