Calle de la Sal

Sol

The name comes from the municipal salt store located in this passage from at least the seventeenth century. On Pedro Teixeira’s map (1656) the street already appears as Calle de la Sal; earlier sources also cite it as “Real de la Sal” or “Red de la Sal”, names alluding to the royal character of the salt revenue, though no located document certifies exactly when the definitive form was adopted.

It measures barely twenty-eight metres long by seven wide, according to Fernández de los Ríos’s reckoning in 1876, and links calle de Postas to the northeastern corner of the Plaza Mayor. The name comes from a closely guarded trade. Salt was a Crown monopoly, and keeping it in stores locked with iron grilles was a practice the king himself regulated. So this alley, hard by the town’s great market, concentrated the traffic of a commodity worth its weight in fiscal control. Benito Pérez Galdós made it the setting of Fortunata y Jacinta and La de Bringas. In 2001 the City Council commissioned Antonio Mingote to paint four trompe-l’oeil scenes on the corner with Postas, where Galdós and his characters appear as if they had moved into the brickwork.

Its names

  • Real de la Sal / Red de la Salanterior a 1656 (fecha no documentada con exactitud)
  • Calle de la Sal1656 – actualidad
Sources (9)

Crossings