Calle de San Buenaventura

The name misleads anyone looking for a convent chapel. It came from a devotional tile fixed above the gate of the garden of San Francisco. In 17th-century Madrid those votive tiles served as boundary marks: they flagged the entrances and edges of Church property, and one was enough to name a whole street. The street was opened in 1611, when the neighbourhood asked for a direct passage between the convent and the Morería. For centuries it lay wedged between San Francisco el Grande and the noble houses of Las Vistillas. At number 7 the Sevillian sculptor Luisa Roldán, “La Roldana”, court sculptor to Charles II and later to Philip V, lived and died in 1706; a judge had declared her destitute five days earlier. The neighbouring plot came down in 1900, and on it rose the Conciliar Seminary of the Immaculate Conception and San Dámaso, in Neo-Mudéjar style, opened in 1906.