Calle de Santa Bárbara

On 4 December 1606, the day the local market traders held their pilgrimage to Saint Barbara, the Discalced Mercedarians bought the chapel crowning the north end of Madrid. That third-century martyr, beheaded by her own father when she refused to renounce Christianity, lent her name to all that grew around it. Over the chapel they built a church and convent, and Calle de Santa Bárbara inherited the name, today joining Fuencarral with Plaza de San Ildefonso, in old Maravillas. When Philip IV walled the town in 1625, the highest point saw the opening of the Santa Bárbara gate, and the gate, the square, and the neighbouring streets borrowed the same name. The convent fell with the disentailment of 1836, but the street never let go of its sign. In the later nineteenth century a modest bohemia lived here. At numbers 8 and 10 stood the Café de los Artistas, with six doors and a spiral staircase, where for a few cents one could watch comic sketches and musical numbers. Across the way ran a goat dairy, a contrast that captures this mixed street well. It falls short of a hundred metres and today serves mostly as a passage into the heart of Malasaña.