Calle de Hospital

Calle del Hospital promises a hospital, and delivers one, but earlier it held a more solemn memory. It runs between Santa Isabel and Argumosa, parallel to Atocha, west of the great building that now houses the Reina Sofía Museum. For a time it was known as calle de los Reyes: when Margaret of Austria, wife of Philip III, promoted the royal patronage of the Monastery of Santa Isabel in 1610, a royal box was set up at the head of the street, and the memory of that crown clung to the place. The name that survived came from the huge building rising alongside. The Hospital General, a merger of several small hospitals ordered by Philip II, was established at the end of Atocha and opened its enlarged wards in 1781 with 1,561 beds. Consolidated to the north of the street, it drove the old name of los Reyes out of use and marked the street with its own.

Bernardino de Obregón, founder of the Mínima Congregación de los Hermanos Enfermeros Pobres, saved a five-year-old boy shut by mistake in the attic of the Hospital de Mujeres Perdidas during a move ordered by Philip II. According to the tradition recorded by several popular chroniclers, Obregón had a vision one night, found the dying child at dawn and secured the release of his mother —⁠who had been unjustly confined. The event spread through the court and left the nickname Niño Perdido attached to the street. Obregón died of the plague in August 1599; the legend of the child does not appear in his entry in the Real Academia de la Historia nor on Wikipedia, which suggests it is an oral tradition documented late, not a fact verified in sources contemporary with the man.