Calle de San Roque

Calle de San Roque climbs north from Calle del Pez, in the heart of the Universidad district. It never had a formal name: the nuns of the convent of San Plácido, founded in 1623, gave it one. When they blessed the building that summer they hung a painting of the pilgrim saint on the wall facing the street, and so it was christened. Saint Roch, born in Montpellier around 1295, protects the plague-stricken and travellers. He is painted with a staff, a sore on his leg, and the dog that fed him while he lay ill. Madrid owed him a chapel promised during old epidemics and never built; that canvas settled, decades late, the town’s debt to the protector against the plague. The convent grew famous for its scandals: twenty-six nuns accused of demonic possession, and a night visit by Philip IV to a novice, foiled by the prioress, who laid the young woman in a coffin ringed with candles. To make amends the king gave the convent the crucified Christ painted by Velázquez, now in the Prado. By the twentieth century the street filled with printing shops and newsrooms, and the Teatro Lara opens its back door onto it.