Calle de San Dimas

Saint Dismas is, by tradition, the thief crucified at Christ’s right hand, the only one promised paradise from the cross. This dead-end lane in the Universidad quarter takes his name: barely 219 metres that start at the Calle de la Palma and stop against a blind wall. The name already appears on the 1769 map; the shrine that gave rise to it is older still. That wall at the far end holds the most surprising story. For nearly a century it was the back boundary of the Hospital de La Princesa, which Isabel II ordered built between 1852 and 1857 to mark her daughter’s birth. Eighteen pavilions in a comb pattern, designed by Aníbal Álvarez Bouquel, with the main door facing straight onto this street. The hospital was demolished in 1962, and on the site rose the Military Cooperative housing by Fernando Higueras and Antonio Miró, whose blocks now crown the street’s far end. Its domestic scale keeps it almost untouched. In a basement here, the Siroco club opened in 1990, for decades the neighbourhood’s musical lighthouse for bands just starting out.