Calle de la Colegiata

Less than two hundred metres between Plaza de Tirso de Molina and Calle de Toledo, this street changed its name more often than any other in Embajadores. Texeira’s 1656 map calls it Calle de la Compañía, after the doors of the Jesuit Imperial College; later came San Isidro, de la Merced and, above all, del Burro (“the donkey”), a nickname that was never official but that popular memory kept fondly. The most believable version tells of a tile on the wall of the Concepción Jerónima convent advertising donkey’s milk for sale; people shortened the sign to its essentials. In 1848 today’s name took hold, taken from the most visible building: the Royal Collegiate Church of San Isidro, whose side façade accompanies the street for some seventy metres. Then came its journalistic century. The Heraldo de Madrid occupied number 7 until 1939, and the conservative El Debate had its offices a few steps away, two rival newsrooms living side by side near Puerta del Sol. Galdós set scenes from Misericordia and Fortunata y Jacinta here, and the street entered the map of the Madrid novel.