Calle de Quiñones

Malasaña·Universidad

The chroniclers' tradition, recorded by Peñasco and Cambronero in 1889 and repeated by Pedro de Répide, attributes the name to a female printer surnamed Quiñones who supposedly had her workshop on this street or nearby. The most cited candidate in later sources is María de Quiñones (d. 1669), the first woman in Madrid to sign as a printer under her own name, active between 1633 and 1666. However, her press is documented on Calle de Atocha, not on Calle de Quiñones. An alternative hypothesis, without firm documentation, links the name to the agrarian term quiñón (a portion of collectively owned arable land), since the area was farmland before the 17th-century development. The Texeira map (1656) does not identify the street by its current name; the Espinosa map (1769) already records it as Quiñones. The first explicit chronicle mention is from 1863, according to research by Somos Malasaña.

Calle de Quiñones runs barely 187 metres in the Universidad district, joining Calle de San Bernardo with Calle del Acuerdo. Its northern side is taken up by the wall of the Monastery of Our Lady of Montserrat, crowned by a Baroque tower Pedro de Ribera designed around 1716. It was home to Benedictine monks who fled the Catalan monastery of Montserrat during the 1640 uprising, taken in at Madrid by Philip IV. After the Mendizábal disentailment, the stretch of the building facing this street became a women’s prison. The neighbourhood christened it La Galera, and there sewing was both sentence and supposed moral cure. Victoria Kent drove reforms before moving the inmates to the new Ventas Prison in 1933. The origin of the name carries a story as often repeated as it is doubtful. Tradition ties it to a female printer surnamed Quiñones said to have had her workshop here, but a 1658 tax document places María de Quiñones on Calle de Atocha. The other explanation, from the agrarian term quiñón, finds no documentary support either.

Its names

  • Sin nombre propio registradoAntes de 1656
  • Calle de Santo Domingo (posible)c. 1656
  • Calle de QuiñonesAntes de 1769 – actualidad
Sources (10)

Crossings