Calle de las Negras

Between calle de la Princesa and travesía del Conde Duque runs a street that for centuries served as an invisible wall: it marked the line where the noble residence ended and the servants' quarters began. The weightiest explanation was left by Peñasco and Cambronero in 1889. The dukes of Veragua, Columbus’s first direct line in Spain, supposedly lodged in a house over this passage the enslaved women they brought from America, while the main palace occupied the site where Liria was later built. Keeping household slaves scandalized no one: by the 18th century some six thousand enslaved people lived in the city. Another, older and vaguer story traces the name to three prisoners that Tamerlane gave as a gift to Henry III of Castile around 1402, though the sources themselves hold it to be less reliable. The 1656 map already draws the layout without a name; the name appears in writing in 1769 and was officially fixed in 1835.