Calle de San Ricardo

Calle de San Ricardo, right beside kilometre zero and almost invisible: it runs from Carretas to the back of the Real Casa de Correos, a step from the Puerta del Sol, and still Madrileños and tourists walk past without seeing it. When the great remodelling of 1854 widened the surrounding streets, this one escaped untouched, which is why it keeps the scale of an earlier Madrid that survives almost nowhere else. The name comes from a hospital, that of San Ricardo, which people called “de Héticos” because it took in the tubercular. Things changed when Elisabeth of Valois gave an image of the Virgin to its chapel: the hospital became known as de la Paz, and from that division two neighbouring streets remained, San Ricardo with the old name and la Paz with the new. In 2016 the Centro District voted to rename it in honour of José Rodríguez Losada, the clockmaker from León who gave Madrid the bell clock of New Year’s Eve. For now the official sign still says what it always has.