Calle de las Mercedes

When the signs of Cuatro Caminos filled with women called Mercedes, they were not all the same. In the nearby Reina Mercedes and Infanta Mercedes the name points to the royal family of Alfonso XII. Here, by contrast, the plural gives it away: las Mercedes is a title of the Virgin Mary, also known as Our Lady of Mercy. That devotion was born in thirteenth-century Barcelona. Tradition holds that the Virgin appeared to Peter Nolasco and asked him to found an order devoted to ransoming Christian captives on the far side of the Mediterranean. From this came the Mercedarians, friars who vowed to give themselves up as hostages if that was what it took to free another. The neighborhood reinforced that memory years later, when the Hispano-American Basilica of Our Lady of Mercy, the Mercedarian seat in Madrid, was raised nearby. The name leaves no doubt about whom this short street, dying against Bravo Murillo, looks to: the Virgin who negotiated ransoms.