Calle de San Ernesto

Behind this name is a 12th-century German abbot who left the cloister for the crusade. Ernest took the vows of Saint Benedict’s rule while young at the monastery of Zwiefalten, in Swabia, and by around 1140 was already the community’s abbot. He governed it for only a few years and in 1146 resigned to join the Second Crusade and set out for the East. It is said that he was taken prisoner and led to Mecca with other Christian captives. There, according to tradition, he refused to renounce his faith and smashed with stones the images he was ordered to venerate, a gesture that would have cost him torture and death around 1148. That part of the story is not reliably documented, but the Church remembers him as a martyr and celebrates his feast on 7 November. Hence the “San” that heads the street. The street skirts the Parque de Berlín, where since 1990 three fragments of the Wall, which fell the year before, have been preserved.