Calle de la Rosa

Lavapiés·Embajadores

The street name admits two explanations that the chroniclers have not settled. Mesonero Romanos, in El antiguo Madrid (1861), groups it with those of Olmo and Olivar as streets named for “the plantings and orchards through which they were laid out”, pointing to a plant origin: the rosebush or rose that grew on that ground before it was built up. Pedro de Répide, in Las calles de Madrid (1921 onward), records instead an oral tradition: there was an inn whose owner was named Rosa, and when Blessed Simón de Rojas pushed for the expulsion of Moriscos and women of ill repute from the quarter, the magistrate Gaspar Ortiz, a judge of the royal household and court, had the place demolished along with the other brothels. The narrow street that remained kept the innkeeper’s name. The two versions coexist without any primary source deciding the matter.

The name of Calle de la Rosa honours no flower. It recalls a woman who ran an inn, and that inn was part of the Lavapiés the town wanted to erase. The street is short, narrow and irregular, in the Embajadores quarter, between calle del Ave María and Torrecilla del Leal. In the early seventeenth century, the Trinitarian Simón de Rojas launched a moral crusade against the brothels of the area. The magistrate Gaspar Ortiz, a judge of the royal household and court, tore down Rosa’s inn along with others of the same kind, and on that razed site the new street was opened, which the neighbourhood went on calling by the innkeeper’s name. Two centuries later the street had its backstage moment: the Teatro de Variedades gave onto it with its secondary premises, until a fire devoured it in the early hours of 28 January 1888.

Its names

  • Calle de la Rosa17th century — actualidad
Sources (6)

Crossings