Calle de Murillo

The name pays tribute to Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (Seville, 1617-1682), one of the great masters of the Spanish Baroque. Murillo filled churches and convents with Immaculate Conceptions, Virgins, and scenes of children, with a tenderness that made him famous inside and outside Spain and one of the most collected painters in Europe in the centuries that followed. The street is very short and opens onto Plaza de Olavide, in the Trafalgar district. It was born with the expansion that Carlos María de Castro planned for Madrid in the mid-19th century, when this land was still open ground with the odd convent and country house. The square was a neighborhood market for decades, and the streets around it were dedicated to painters of the Golden Age. At number 8 the Relojería Santolaya is still open, devoted to restoring antique clocks since the mid-20th century, so the painter’s name shares this pavement with the craft of time.