Calle de Miguel Servet

Before any name fixed it, there was a ravine here: the natural gully that separated the Lavapiés suburb from the land that would become the glorieta de Embajadores. The 1769 map labels it bluntly as “barranco de Lavapiés.” The street was born in the 19th century, when the ravine was levelled, hugging on the east the wall of the old Royal Tobacco Factory. Near Mesón de Paredes survives a tenement built for that factory’s workers, which in 1890 employed 6,300 people. The council named it in 1883, when municipal liberalism had a weakness for rescuing intellectuals persecuted by the Church. Miguel Servet fit perfectly. In his Christianismi Restitutio (1553) he hid the first printed description in the West of pulmonary circulation, anticipating Harvey. That same year he was arrested in Geneva and burned alive on 27 October, with the wood deliberately damp so the ordeal would last longer. He burned with a copy of his book tied to his body. In 1903 the Geneva Calvinists themselves raised a monument of atonement at Champel.