Calle de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores
Named after Our Lady of Sorrows, an invocation of the Virgin Mary that recalls a mother’s suffering before the passion of her son.
The name evokes the Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin whom Christian devotion pictures with her heart pierced by seven swords, one for each sorrow of her life. The devotion took hold around the thirteenth century with the Servite friars and spread without need of an apparition: it springs from a mother’s grief.
Why calle de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores took this name has not survived. It fits a habit of Valdeacederas, a district that grew at the end of the nineteenth century north of Cuatro Caminos, with humble streets named after saints and Marian devotions. The district’s own place name holds another story: it means “valley of the sorrels,” after the sour-leaved plant that grew on this nearly rural land. Beneath the name of a grieving Virgin runs a street that once smelled of open country.