Calle de la Almudena

Today the name barely covers a few metres, but those metres hold the very origin of the city. The alley opens where the great mosque of Mayrit stood, the defensive redoubt of 9th-century Arab Madrid. When Alfonso VI took the town around 1083, a church rose over the mosque that the Fuero of Madrid of 1202 already names as Santa María la Mayor, the oldest parish in town. “Almudena” comes from the Arabic al-mudayna, “citadel”. The street was short and bent at an elbow between calle Mayor and the old wall, a shortcut between the Alcázar and the main artery. For centuries the church pursued a rise to cathedral that never came: the Toledo chapter blocked, again and again, Madrid’s separation from its archdiocese. The end came with Madoz’s disentailment. The last service was held on 25 October 1868 and the demolition finished in May 1869. In 1883 Alfonso XII granted land on the Plaza de la Armería for a new cathedral; the image of the Virgin wandered from place to place until it settled in the church consecrated in 1993.