Calle de la Macarena

The name travels from Seville to this corner of Nueva España. La Macarena is the invocation of the Virgin of Hope venerated in the Seville neighbourhood of the same name, an anonymous seventeenth-century image. Each Good Friday dawn she passes through the streets amid saetas and thousands of candles, with a devotion that long ago spilled beyond Andalusia. The place name is older than the image: Macarena already named the land beside one of the gates in Seville’s wall, and the Virgin later took the name of the place. On this stretch of Chamartín the surrounding streets share an Andalusian air, a legacy of the years when northern Madrid dreamed of being a little Mecca of cinema and the Sevilla Films studios raised sets nearby.