Calle de las Tres Cruces

The street runs down from the plaza del Carmen to the Gran Vía, though it did not always end there: until the Gran Vía works cut off its end in 1910, it continued to calle de Jacometrezo. At number 8, for more than two centuries, beat the Hospital de los Franceses, founded in 1615 to aid poor pilgrims arriving from France, administered jointly by the Spanish and French crowns. Under the French occupation, between 1809 and 1812, a premises on this same street hid a less pious story: the Grand National Lodge of Spain met there. When Joseph I Bonaparte fled Madrid in 1812, the lodge vanished with him. A nickname remained, recorded by Llorente and Galdós: they called it the “lodge of the Three Crosses.”