Calle de la Cabeza

It runs north to south through Embajadores, between Jesús y María and Ave María, two blocks from Tirso de Molina. Texeira’s 1656 map already draws it under this name. The name springs from the neighbourhood’s most-told legend: a wealthy cleric, a Portuguese servant who beheads him, the flight to Portugal, the disguised return years later, and a ram’s head bought at the Rastro that, when the killer was arrested, turned out to be the victim’s head. Philip III had a stone head carved on the house façade. The legend even explains the neighbouring calle del Carnero (Ram). But the street hides something darker. At number 14 ran the Crown Jail, for clerics guilty of civil crimes, with five brick cells still visible in the basement. There, on 4 May 1821, died Matías Vinuesa, the priest of Tamajón, lynched by a mob. And here in 1659 died the playwright Felipe Godínez, a converso tried by the Inquisition. An impossible head, a jail for priests, a lynching and a Golden Age poet, in a single street.