Calle del Calvario

Calle del Calvario runs downhill between Calle de Jesús y María and Calle del Olivar, in Embajadores, and still keeps a pedestrian stretch. The name is no gentle metaphor: a real Via Crucis once ended here, laid out by the Franciscans with stone crosses marking each station, all the way to an open field where Calvary was re-enacted. Because the ground was consecrated, the field also served as a cemetery: it took in the poor of the neighbourhood and executed criminals whom civil justice would not allow in the parish burial grounds. When the street was opened years later, the diggers unearthed skeletons by the heap. By 1613 the town had grown so much that the Via Crucis was moved elsewhere, and the old Calvary was swallowed by the city. The neighbourhood was always one of artisans and day labourers. In one of its houses, on 9 February 1804, Luis Candelas was born, the most famous bandit of Romantic Madrid.