Calle de San Cosme y San Damián

Lavapiés·Embajadores

The street takes its name from a chapel that existed in the palace of the Marquis of Aitona, where images of the martyr-physician saints Cosmas and Damian were venerated. To maintain the worship of those images, a brotherhood of health professionals was formed that bought land in the Convent of Carmen Calzado with funds left by the marchioness, where it built a chapel and altarpiece. The confraternity was founded by the physician of the marquises' own family.

Calle de San Cosme y San Damián runs down from calle de Santa Isabel to calle de la Fe. To the north it brushes the Palace of Fernán Núñez, and the name was born from the chapel of another palace, that of the Marquis of Aitona, where the two saints were venerated. Cosmas and Damian were brothers, physicians, and natives of Arabia. They practised in Cilicia during the 3rd century and healed the sick without charging a single coin —⁠hence the Greek nickname tradition gave them: anargyroi, “the enemies of money”. That selflessness did not spare them a bad end: they were executed during Diocletian’s persecution. In Madrid the devotion went back far. A brotherhood of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries existed as early as 1583 and came to have a chapel and altarpiece in the Convent of Carmen Calzado, which burned in 1936. The street’s surroundings formed part of the zone of hospitals and convents that spread south of the walls from the time of Philip II, which explains why it ended up dedicated to two unpaid physicians.

Its names

  • Calle de San Cosme y San Damián17th century – actualidad
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Crossings