Calle de Jesús Aprendiz

The street alludes to the years Jesus of Nazareth spent working in Joseph’s workshop, the episode known as the hidden life of Christ. It is part of the repertoire of biblical place names in the Niño Jesús district, urbanised by URBIS from 1947 to a design by Domínguez Salazar and Sáinz de Vicuña.

In the Retiro district there is a whole neighbourhood whose streets read like a nativity scene: Anunciación, Portal de Belén, Reyes Magos, the avenida de Nazaret. The set is called Niño Jesús, and Inmobiliaria Urbis began urbanising it in 1947 to a design by the architects José Antonio Domínguez Salazar and Manuel Sáinz de Vicuña. The district’s name came from earlier. It had been set by the Niño Jesús Hospital, founded in 1877 by María Hernández Espinosa, Duchess of Santoña. When the new streets had to be named, they all came from that same family: episodes and figures from the story of Jesus’s childhood. The Calle de Jesús Aprendiz belongs to that repertoire. It refers not to a devotional image or any brotherhood, but to the child Jesus working beside Joseph in the workshop of Nazareth, the scene Juan de Valdés Leal painted around 1680-85. No record survives of the exact date the street took the name.

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