Calle de San Hermenegildo

Sixtus V canonised the Visigothic prince Hermenegild in 1585, at the request of Philip II. A print or a doorway bearing his figure must have watched over the street, like so many in old Madrid named after the votive images that hung on façades. A note for the visitor: there was a convent of San Hermenegildo, but it stood on the Calle de Alcalá and has nothing to do with this stretch of Malasaña. Through the 19th century the street lived poor, with “narrow, shabby-looking” houses, tenement yards and even a sulphuric-acid store. The event that made it famous took place on 16 October 1884 at number 15: Luis Jiménez Pérez, a military man already carrying an assassination attempt against Isabel II, shot his wife, Carolina Martínez Castilla, at point-blank range as she came down the stairs with her infant son in her arms. The case ended up printed in the “Famous Trials” collection. In our own century, the street-art collective Boa Mistura set up its studio here, in a warehouse they renamed the “cucumber factory”.

On 16 October 1884, Luis Jiménez Pérez —⁠a soldier with a record of regicide, amnestied in 1868⁠— killed his estranged wife Carolina Martínez Castilla in the doorway of number 15, shooting her at point-blank range while she held her nursing child in her arms. A seven-millimetre bullet lodged in her right cerebral hemisphere. The case was published in “Procesos Célebres” (Revista de Legislación, 1885) and was the most sensational crime to give the street its popular name in the nineteenth-century press.