Calle de San Bernardo

Calle de San Bernardo begins at Plaza de Santo Domingo and climbs to Glorieta de Quevedo, crossed by the Gran Vía. For centuries it was the northern gate of the town, the start of the road to Fuencarral; Teixeira’s map labels it camino de Alcovendas. The name comes from a building. On the site of a former convalescents' hospital, Alonso de Peralta raised the Cistercian monastery of Santa Ana de los Bernardos, which said its first mass in 1596. The street’s width, unusual then, drew attention, and hence the nickname it carried for two centuries: Calle Ancha de San Bernardo. It filled with institutions that shaped its character: Pedro de Ribera’s church of Montserrat, the Salesas Nuevas, and the Jesuit Novitiate that handed its building to the Central University in 1836. On 24 June 1858 the waters of the Lozoya reached Madrid for the first time through the Canal de Isabel II, and it was celebrated with a fountain before Montserrat whose jet leapt over nine metres high. At number 35 a plaque recalls that Emilia Pardo Bazán lived there between 1890 and 1915.