Calle del Carnero

Calle del Carnero runs down from the Ribera de Curtidores towards Calle de Arganzuela, in the heart of the Rastro, and its name smells of an old trade. In the 17th century this area south of Madrid held the municipal slaughterhouse and the guilds that lived off the killing of animals: tanners, tallow-makers and butchers. Earlier it was called Calle Nueva, the label 16th- and 17th-century Madrid gave to any newly opened street. Its present name came from the trade that defined it: the butchers and market inspectors sold ram meat here and, each year during the feast of St Lawrence, held a raffle of livestock. The Rastro’s stalls ruled here for centuries. Today the street keeps its working-class air among antique shops and the sellers who each Sunday carry on the market’s tradition.

According to the tradition recorded by Pedro de Répide, a servant who years earlier had slit the throat of his master, a priest, on the Calle de la Cabeza fled to Portugal with the loot. Returning to Madrid disguised as a gentleman, he bought a ram’s head at the Rastro. When a constable stopped him because of the trail of blood he was leaving under his cloak, the man produced the item, but instead of the animal’s head there appeared that of the murdered priest. The servant confessed and was hanged in the Plaza Mayor; according to the account, when the sentence was carried out the head became that of the ram again. The scandal emptied the butcher shops in the area and, according to the second legend about the origin of the name, it was that neighborhood panic that led the butchers to ask the City Council for a new location, which turned out to be this street.