Calle de Vandergoten

The street takes the surname of the Van der Gotens, a family of master tapestry weavers of Flemish origin whom Philip V brought to Madrid in 1720 to found the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara. Jacob van der Goten the Elder arrived on 30 July of that year with his wife Ana María Canyuwell and six children, after nine months imprisoned in the castle of Antwerp —⁠arrested by the Austrian authorities governing the Southern Netherlands⁠— and the loss of all his possessions. The factory started up in 1721 and the family ran it for decades; the street that keeps their name now skirts the building where the works settled permanently in 1889.

This street’s name belongs to a Flemish family of weavers who crossed Europe with their looms on their backs to found the Royal Tapestry Factory. It all begins with a supply crisis. After the Treaty of Utrecht, the flow of Flemish tapestries that dressed the Spanish royal palaces was cut off, and Philip V needed someone to restore it on home soil. Jacob van der Goten the Elder, a master weaver from Brussels, was recruited. When the Austrian authorities controlling the Southern Netherlands learned of his departure, they arrested him and held him nine months in the castle of Antwerp. He reached Madrid on 30 July 1720 without a single possession, but with what mattered: his looms, his wife and six children. The Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara started up in 1721. Under the direction of his son Cornelius came the workshop’s most famous episode: in 1775 a young Francisco de Goya joined as a cartoon painter, and went on making designs for the tapestries until 1792. In 1889 the factory moved to a neo-Mudéjar building in the Pacífico district. La calle de Vandergoten runs right along that building, and its name is born of that closeness. The exact date of the naming has not survived.

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