Calle de la Flora

Sol

The name comes, according to the most widespread tradition, from a statue or relief of Flora, the Roman goddess of spring and flowers, that stood in one of the street’s houses. A second tradition, recorded by Peñasco and Cambronero and accepted with reservations by Répide, attributes the name to the palace held there by Flora de Nieremberg, paternal aunt of the Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, born in that same house in 1595.

Short and unassuming, Calle de la Flora joins Plaza de Santa Catalina de los Donados with Plaza de San Martín, in the Sol district. With no striking shopfronts or monumental façade, its history lies not in the stones but in what the name carries behind it. Mesonero Romanos counted it among the lanes of the old San Martín suburb. The name crosses two threads that rarely touch: one classical, Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, tied to an image once kept in one of the houses; the other flesh and blood, a German family settled at the court of Philip II, whose surname stuck to the street. And here is the surprise: on this modest street was born, in 1595, one of the most prolific Jesuit polymaths of seventeenth-century Castile, an author who wrote tirelessly from a corner that today no one stops to look at.

Its names

  • Calle de HitaPeriodo medieval (sin fecha documental precisa)
  • Calle de Santa Catalina1656 (plano de Teixeira)
  • Calle de FlorSiglo 18th (plano de Tomás 50thópez)
  • Calle de la Flora1769 en adelante (plano de Espinosa)
Sources (6)

Crossings