Calle de San Rafael

Raphael is one of the three archangels named in the Bible, and the only one who acts as a physician. His story fills the Book of Tobit: disguised as a traveller called Azarias, he goes with young Tobias on a long journey, defends him from a fish in the Tigris and teaches him to keep the animal’s liver and gall as a remedy. With that gall he later restores the sight of the boy’s blind father. Hence his name, from the Hebrew rafa’el, “God has healed”, and his patronage over the sick and over travellers. Why this name landed on this particular street in Tetuán is not documented. The neighbourhood grew in the late nineteenth century as a spontaneous shantytown around Bravo Murillo, and much of its layout was signposted with the names of saints without any reason recorded. San Rafael is one of those short streets, barely ninety metres, that ordered the grid of the old Tetuán de las Victorias. It began as an alley before becoming a street.