Calle de Zurita

Before it was called Zurita, this street in the Embajadores district went by a much darker name. On the map Pedro Teixeira engraved in 1656 it appears as “Curvo”, almost certainly a mistranscription of “Cuervo” (crow). By 1769 the bird had gone and it already read Zurita. No one decreed it: the street renamed itself, by sheer local usage. The surname comes from Jerónimo Zurita, one of the great Spanish historians of the 16th century. To write his Annals of the Crown of Aragon he searched archives in Naples, Rome, Flanders and Sicily, and along the way imposed a new habit: checking documents before believing them. The curious thing is that not a single source places him living here. According to tradition, it was his descendants who had houses on the street, and the surname stuck. Mesonero Romanos passed through in 1861 and dismissed it almost without a glance, among the typical streets of the poor quarters of which “we have nothing to recall”. That artisan, working-class vocation is still alive: at number 20, since 2013, the Teatro del Barrio has operated, a cultural cooperative that won the National Theatre Prize in 2024.