Calle de las Provisiones

Lavapiés·Embajadores

The name comes from the army victuals store that occupied the southern end of the street during the reign of Ferdinand VII. In 1835, when the Corregidor Marqués de Pontejos carried out the great reform of Madrid’s street names, the street was named Provisiones in direct reference to that depot. The building was later turned into what eventually became the Tobacco Factory of Embajadores.

Calle de las Provisiones is barely a hundred metres in the heart of Embajadores, yet it carries more names and trades than many long avenues. It was a dyers' corner —⁠on the 1761 map it was calle del Tinte⁠— and also calle del Amor de Dios Baja, to avoid confusion with the one that still survives in the same Lavapiés tangle. The present name came in 1835, when Pontejos ordered the street names. “Provisiones” is no metaphor: at the end of the street, in the time of Ferdinand VII, stood an army victuals store. The building that held it has a dizzying biography: Royal Distillery and Playing-Card Factory, then Napoleon’s barracks, then a tobacco factory, and today La Tabacalera, which fills the whole block up to the Glorieta de Embajadores. At number 14 a corrala survives, with an old granite well in its courtyard; residents call it the well of Luis Candelas, where the bandit is said to have hidden his loot before sharing it out. No one has proved it, but the story is still told.

Its names

  • Calle del Tintec. 1761
  • Calle del Amor de Dios Baja17th-18th centuries
  • Calle de las Provisiones / Calle de Provisiones1835 – actualidad
Sources (8)

Crossings