Calle de San Onofre

A street of barely sixty metres that starts at Fuencarral and ends against the side of the convent of the Mercedarians of Don Juan de Alarcón, the ones the neighbourhood calls Las Alarconas, over on Valverde. It appears under its name on the Texeira map of 1656, carrying it from a time no one remembers: when the north of the town was woodland crossed by streams, there was a hermitage here to Saint Onuphrius, a 4th-century anchorite who spent more than sixty years in the desert of Egypt. That his devotion caught on here has one cause: Francisco Ramírez de Madrid, the Artilleryman, who after the taking of Málaga in 1487 credited the saint with his victory and raised chapels to him. At number 4 a plaque recalls the child who lived there between 1873 and 1882: Isaac Albéniz, in the years he was training at the Royal Conservatory. And what keeps the street’s name alive today is the Horno de San Onofre, open since 1972 on the site of the old confectioner’s El Buen Gusto that Galdós mentioned in Fortunata and Jacinta.