Calle del Barco

Between calle del Desengaño and the plaza de San Ildefonso runs this street of the Universidad quarter whose name still stirs debate among students of Madrid’s street map. The land belonged to the prior of Santo Domingo de Silos, who shared out plots between two nobles; on one of them Juan Pacheco de Alarcón formalised in 1609 the Discalced Mercedarian convent that still survives at the corner with calle de la Puebla. The name drags several explanations behind it. Capmany, in 1863, pointed to the shape of the ground. Peñasco and Cambronero expanded it with oral tradition: someone in the retinue of the marchioness of Villaflores, seeing the lowered plot being levelled, said it looked like a ship. Another version puts the phrase in the mouth of the confessor Juan de Alarcón, who is said to have finished it with “and in it go friars and nuns.” Mesonero Romanos kept to the shape: the pavement drew the hull of a vessel. Texeira’s map (1656) still labels it Calle de Don Juan de Alarcón; by Espinosa’s (1769) it was already Calle del Barco.