Calle de Santa Inés

A short street, barely a couple of blocks, joining Atocha with Santa Isabel, in the Embajadores district. Whoever walks it today passes between two masses of stone, but the name comes from neither of them. It comes from something far humbler that stood there before: blacksmiths' workshops. Over the door of those workshops hung a small altarpiece with the image of the martyr Agnes. In the Madrid of the 17th and 18th centuries it was the custom to nail devotional prints to the lintels of houses and workshops, and from that came the names of several streets. This is one of them: there was no convent of Saint Agnes, nor religious foundation to christen it. Only an image over a smithy. The great buildings came later. On one side rose the huge block built from 1831 over the old Hospital de la Pasión, which housed the Royal College of Surgery of San Carlos and served as Faculty of Medicine until 1950. On the other, the wall of the convent of Santa Isabel. So this street was wedged in: a narrow, steady corridor since the 18th century, with a memory of iron and devotion hidden in its name.