Calle de Montserrat

Calle de Montserrat descends barely three hundred metres through the Universidad quarter, but its name was born hundreds of kilometres away, on a Catalan mountain. It all began with a quarrel of monks: in 1640 the Catalan community of Montserrat, tired of the abbot always being a Castilian, seized on the uprising against Philip IV to expel the monks of Castile. The king took them in at Madrid and found them a site by the Fuencarral gate. There, in 1668, Sebastián Herrera Barnuevo drew the plans for church and convent. He died without seeing the walls stand; Gaspar de la Peña carried on until the money ran out, and in 1716 Pedro de Ribera raised the façade and crowned the only tower ever finished with its bulbous spire. The dome and second tower stayed on paper. The 1836 disentailment turned the convent into a women’s prison, the Casa Galera, until Victoria Kent moved the inmates to Ventas. Today it is a priory of the Benedictines of Silos. On the northern side, in 1891 the first Mahou brewery was raised, which today houses the ABC Museum.

Benito Pérez Galdós sets a scene of his novel Miau (1888) in this church: the boy Luisito feels a paralysing fear before the Christ of Burgos, a life-size crucifix with real hair and bloodstains, to which he attributes a terrifying aspect. Galdós describes it on the right side of the church, though the image in fact occupies the left chapel. The original sculpture, attributed to Alonso Cano, passed to the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts; the reproduction that remains in the church preserves the tradition of hanging ostrich eggs at its feet, an offering whose origin is linked to a Burgos merchant who brought them from Africa.