Calle de los Abades

Calle de los Abades barely spans a block between Embajadores and Mesón de Paredes, in the old medieval Mudéjar district, with those crooked lanes that still hold the memory of how southern Madrid grew. Behind the name are two brothers: Rodrigo and García Abad, town aldermen who spent their income on pious works and relief for the poor. When the knight Diego de Vera wanted to build an oratory, the Abad brothers put up the money, and from that oratory came, in 1644, a convent of Regular Clerics. Of the whole complex, only the church of San Millán and San Cayetano remains, on Embajadores, where the tomb of Pedro de Ribera rests. On their deaths, the brothers shared out their estate among the poor and the charity houses.

Pedro de Répide records that, when the Theatines were in extreme want, a donkey appeared at the door of the Abad mansion and no one could drive it away. The councilmen, aware of the convent’s misery, ordered the animal loaded with everything in their larder. The donkey, with no one to guide it, set off straight to the house of the laymen of San Cayetano and stopped before their door. The scene was fixed in popular memory with the date of 7 August, the feast of Saint Cajetan, when the friars had sat down at table with nothing to eat.