Calle de la Huerta del Bayo

Near the Rastro, between Calle de Embajadores and Calle de la Peña de Francia, a short street keeps in its name the memory of an orchard that ceased to exist centuries ago. In the sixteenth century all this lay outside the walls. Here the licentiate Francisco del Bayo, a cleric who around 1566 briefly headed the Estudio de la Villa, kept an extensive orchard; through the halls of that humanist centre passed López de Hoyos and a very young Cervantes. Répide called him “the cleric Bayo” and wrote that his property named the Huerta del Bayo quarter. In time the orchard changed hands, and some of its plots ended up in the estate of the Casino de la Reina, the neoclassical villa the city gave in 1817 to Queen Isabella of Braganza. In 1835, when the council first ordered the street register and removed duplicate names⁠—⁠there were at least six San Isidro streets⁠—⁠the street received the name Huerta del Bayo, reviving the name of the field that had preceded it. The park now occupying the Casino’s plot keeps that name and is the last physical trace of that estate.