Calle de Isabel Tintero

In early 1787, some children rummaging in a plot near the Puerta de Toledo came upon an abandoned canvas of Our Lady of Solitude. Isabel Tintero, caretaker of a tenement on calle de la Paloma, bought it for a few coins, cleaned it and hung it in her doorway beneath a small lantern. The neighbours came first out of curiosity and soon were praying every night. The devotion grew as far as the court: Queen María Luisa of Parma credited the image with curing her son Ferdinand, the future Ferdinand VII. The people began to call her the Virgin of La Paloma, after the street where it had all begun. Isabel hid the canvas during the French invasion to save it from looting, and died in 1813 without seeing it displayed again. From that neighbourhood came the famous festival that Ricardo de la Vega and Tomás Bretón brought to the Teatro Apolo in 1894. Calle de Isabel Tintero received its name in 1990: barely a hundred metres for the caretaker who paid a few coins for a painting and, without knowing it, founded one of Madrid’s liveliest devotions.