Calle de Sombrerete

Calle de Sombrerete owes its name to a humble, sinister object: a cloth hat that ended up rotting on a dung heap, on the very plots the street now runs through. It goes from the Plaza de Lavapiés to that of Embajadores. The story begins far from Madrid. In 1594 a man of murky identity appeared in Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Gabriel de Espinosa, the pastrycook of Madrigal, who passed himself off as King Sebastian of Portugal, vanished in 1578. Fray Miguel de los Santos, an Augustinian friar, plotted a conspiracy with him. The deception collapsed, the pastrycook was hanged, and the friar was defrocked and dressed in an old black cloak and a little hat before being dragged to the Plaza Mayor and executed in October 1595. Once the execution was over, someone paraded the little hat nailed to a pole and ended up throwing it onto a dung heap. No one picked it up. It stayed there rotting long enough for people to call the place the spot of the hanged man’s little hat. Over the years the name was shortened. An unsettling doubt remains: the trial documents never make clear whether Espinosa was an impostor or the true King Sebastian, whom Philip II had good reason to erase. The street also holds the Corrala de Sombrerete, from 1872, the largest and best-preserved in Madrid.