Calle de la Escalinata

Calle de la Escalinata climbs through the Palacio district from Calle del Mesón de Paños to Plaza de Isabel II, right in front of the Teatro Real. Its broken course already marked the ground in the Middle Ages, when the Arenal stream bit into the town’s western slope. The names followed the trades. It was Calle de las Fuentes after the Caños del Peral, a spring ringed by gardens; once these were lost in the seventeenth century, the ravine became so inviting to wrongdoers that it had to be closed off with a wooden fence. Later it was Calle de los Tintoreros or de los Tintes (“of the dyers”), after the craftsmen dyeing silks nearby; so it is labelled by Texeira (1656) and Espinosa (1769). Its present face arrived in the nineteenth century. When the Teatro Real was built, the old bed of the Arenal was filled in and Plaza de Isabel II ended up some eight metres above the street; to bridge the gap the staircase that gave it its name was built. Beneath the pavement a stretch of the twelfth-century Christian wall still survives, with a tower that in 2022 was to be protected by turning the plot into a green area.