Calle del Bastero

Between calle de Toledo and calle del Carnero, in the heart of the Embajadores quarter, a pedestrian stretch barely a hundred and fifty metres long bears the nickname of a 16th-century craftsman. Jaime was called el Bastero by his neighbours, and from that nickname the street’s name was born. A bastero made bastas, the leather-and-straw pads that form the packsaddle used to load the backs of beasts. It was a guild trade, with its own saddlers' ordinances documented as early as 1680, and it had its place: the street ran down towards the Toledo road, near the old slaughterhouse, among muleteers, halter-makers and harness-makers. Where mules came and went from the town, there was someone to prepare their saddle. Jaime the bastero did more than stitch leather. He gave the land on which Pedro de Cuenca built the San Lorenzo shelter in 1598, a charity house that handed out bread and beds to the poor who wandered by night. One quip remains to be set aside: in 1863 Capmany suggested, half in jest, that Jaime made not packsaddles but painted the clubs (bastos) on playing-card decks. The chroniclers keep it as a curiosity and return to the trade.