Calle de la Cava Alta

“Cava” was the ditch dug beside the 12th-century Christian wall. The Cava Baja took the deepest stretch; the Cava Alta, a higher sector that never really functioned as a ditch. Both long carried the suffix “de San Francisco”, being the road to the basilica, until the 1835 reform removed it. The street begins on Calle de Toledo with a ninety-degree turn and drops towards the Plaza del Humilladero, near where the Puerta de Moros stood. It runs parallel to the Cava Baja, but here homes prevail and commerce steps aside. Where it meets Calle de Toledo there was a small square with a curious name, la Berenjena (the Aubergine), after a garden planted with aubergines at the house of Beatriz Galindo, la Latina; it vanished in 1835 with the widening of the Toledo road. Texeira’s 1656 map still labels it Cava Alta de San Francisco; Espinosa’s, around 1769, already trims it to plain Cava Alta.