Calle de la Palma

Malasaña·Universidad

The name derives from the Arroyo de las Palmas, a stream that ran across this ground before it was built up. Tradition holds that a palm tree⁠—⁠a remnant of that riverside vegetation⁠—⁠stood on the spot where the street was later opened and gave it its name. Peñasco y Cambronero (1889) doubted the botany: they found it unlikely that Madrid’s climate would have allowed palm trees. The street has kept the name since the seventeenth century, when the quarter filled up under the reign of Philip III.

Calle de la Palma This street crosses the Universidad quarter from east to west, from Fuencarral to Amaniel, which in the seventeenth century was still the northern outskirts of the town. The building that gave the street its origin was the convent of Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, where a community of Discalced Carmelites moved in 1616 and consecrated its church in 1647. The convent fell in 1869, during the disentailment, to open the Plaza del Dos de Mayo. In the twentieth century the street became the cultural heart of the quarter. Number 14 was the home and studio of the painters Costus, and there Pedro Almodóvar filmed interiors of his first feature in 1980. Half of the Movida passed through those rooms: Alaska, Tino Casal, Fabio McNamara, Carlos Berlanga.

Its names

  • Arroyo de las Palmas (topónimo territorial)before the 17th century
  • Calle de la Cruz Nueva / Cruz del Rey17th century (primera mitad)
  • Calle de la Palma17th century (consolidado)
Sources (9)

Crossings