Calle de la Luna

Calle de la Luna drops from Calle del Desengaño to San Bernardo, in the Universidad district. It was already laid out when Texeira drew his map in 1656, but the name comes from much earlier. It is said that in the time of the Catholic Monarchs two factions were at odds on this land, and that their leaders died at the foot of a tower thereafter called the Tower of the Moon. Isabella I, bent on tearing down seigneurial towers, ordered the houses razed; over the site rose another dwelling with a moon carved on its façade, and from that stone the name leapt to the street. It is a scholarly legend, with no archival record. The street always had a genteel air, lined with palaces one after another in the eighteenth century. Commerce left its own memory: at number 14, the Chocolatería El Indio ground cocoa from 1847 and was one of Madrid’s oldest chocolate shops until 1994. Almost opposite, the tavern Casa Pascual became in the 1930s a headquarters of the Generation of '27; García Lorca, Cernuda and Neruda passed through, and Neruda recalled it in a 1970 poem.