Calle de los Mártires de Alcalá

Conde Duque·Universidad

The street owes its name to a hermitage or chapel dedicated to the child martyrs Justus and Pastor, born in Complutum (present-day Alcalá de Henares) and beheaded in the year 304 during Diocletian’s persecution. That chapel, whose existence is attributed —⁠according to the tradition recorded by Peñasco and Cambronero⁠— to the time of the Muslim occupation, was demolished in the 17th century. Espinosa’s map (1769) already records the present name; Texeira’s (1656) shows the streets without one.

Calle de los Mártires de Alcalá runs down from calle de la Princesa to Alberto Aguilera, in the Universidad neighbourhood. The name comes from a hermitage that no map before Espinosa’s ever drew: Peñasco and Cambronero recorded the tradition cautiously in 1889 — here there was, “so they say”, a chapel to Saints Justus and Pastor “since the time of the Moors”, pulled down in the 17th century. Justus and Pastor are the patrons of Alcalá de Henares. They were seven and nine years old when they left their school tablets and presented themselves before the governor Datianus, who had them beheaded around the year 304. Only the name remained, the shadow of a building that left almost no other trace. Nearby stood, in the 18th century, the Casa del Duende (House of the Sprite), where mysterious beings were said to live; the real explanation was less ghostly: in the cellar operated a gang of counterfeiters who paid dwarfs to terrify the tenants.

Its names

  • Sin denominaciónAnterior a 1769 (plano de Texeira, 1656)
  • Calle de los Mártires de AlcaláDocumentado en el plano de Espinosa (1769), nombre anterior no consta
Sources (7)

Crossings