Calle de Santiago El Verde

El Rastro·Embajadores

The street takes its name from the chapel of Saint Philip and Saint James, popularly known as the chapel of Santiago el Verde (Saint James the Green), which stood beside the Manzanares. The “green” epithet came, according to the chronicler Jerónimo de la Quintana, from the great freshness and pleasantness of the groves in spring. The pilgrimage held there on 1 May was the most crowded popular festival in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Madrid; the chapel collapsed in the mid-seventeenth century, but the name survived in the streets of the Inclusa district.

For centuries, on the first of May all Madrid emptied toward the river. From the king to the humblest resident, the whole town went down to an island in the Manzanares to celebrate the festival that named Calle de Santiago El Verde, in the heart of Embajadores, in what was the Inclusa district. The name comes from a chapel. After the Reconquest the kings granted the knights of the Order of Santiago a ford of the river, where they raised a chapel dedicated to Saint Philip and Saint James. The people renamed it for what they saw around it: the thick green of the Manzanares groves. Santiago el Verde, simply that. The pilgrimage entered literature through the front door: Lope de Vega gave it a whole play, and Calderón, Góngora, and Quevedo named it in their verse. A French traveller noted in 1654 the leading role women played in the day. The end came through the calendar: when Philip IV died on 1 May 1665, mourning banned celebration, the devotion moved to 15 May, Saint Isidore’s day, and the festival faded. But the name of that chapel clung to the neighbourhood, turned into a street sign.

Its names

  • Camino o vereda de Santiago el Verde16th-17th centuries (hipotético)
  • Calle de Santiago el Verde18th century (al menos)
Sources (7)

Crossings