Calle de la Lechuga

Sol

The street takes its name from the vegetable market that settled on it: sellers from the Manzanares valley and from Aranjuez set up their stalls of lettuce and similar greens here. The name is documented at least since 1656, when it appears with that name on Texeira’s map.

Calle de la Lechuga barely stretches to six doorways. It runs south of the Plaza Mayor, in the Sol district, linking Calle del Salvador with Calle Imperial. So brief that a visitor crosses it without meaning to, yet it has stayed identical for centuries: its layout already appears on Texeira’s 1656 map and returns unchanged on Espinosa’s of 1769. The name smells of vegetables, and for good reason. In 1622, the Court of Magistrates ordered fruit selling concentrated in the Plaza Mayor. The market gardeners who came up laden along Calle de Toledo then set their vegetable stalls in the nearby lanes, and from those stalls came the leafy nickname. The curious thing is that Madrid had another Calle de la Lechuga, now erased from the map, beside the old convent of Santa Ana, in what is today Plaza de Santa Ana. Two lettuces for a single city, and only one survived.

Its names

  • Calle de la Lechugaanterior a 1656 – actualidad
Sources (6)

Crossings