Calle de la Ballesta

Barely sixty metres between the Corredera Baja de San Pablo and calle del Desengaño, and that stretch holds half of old Madrid. Texeira’s map already labelled it in 1656. The German community that came with the Habsburg court moved here; the church of San Antonio de los Alemanes, a few steps away, keeps the memory of that neighbourhood. The legend that named it tells of a German hunter who set up a shooting yard: boars, wolves and deer chained up so anyone could practise with the crossbow for a fee. One day a huge boar tore out the post and killed the owner with a single tusk. The yard vanished; the name stayed. Best read as legend, not record. The 19th century left weighty figures: at number 13 Rosalía de Castro stayed around 1857 and published La Flor there. The second half of the century turned the street into one of the axes of Madrid street prostitution, a reputation that lasted until 2007, when the Triball project bought and closed premises to draw fashion and commerce, opening a long tug-of-war over gentrification.

Rosalía de Castro arrived in Madrid around 1856 with no means and lodged in the ground floor of number 13, at the home of a relative of her father. From that same address she delivered to the printer La Flor (1857), her first book of poems in Castilian, when she was twenty. On 10 October 1858 she left that house to marry Manuel Murguía in the church of San Ildefonso, a hundred metres away. The street that would give its name to a 21st-century urban renewal project was, before that, the starting point of Galician literary work in Madrid.