Calle del Cordón

Los Austrias·Palacio

The name comes from the carved stone cord that adorned the façade of the Casas del Cordón, residence of the Counts of Puñonrostro, in the small square of the same name that the street borders at its northern end. The cord is a Franciscan motif — a symbol of the order’s three vows — common in Spanish civil architecture of the 15th and 16th centuries. A second tradition attributes it to a stone cord placed by Juan Delgado in memory of a helmet lost at the battle of Almansa (1707).

The street drops in flights of steps from the Plaza de la Villa to Calle de Segovia, and those steps mark the old path that linked the churches of San Salvador and San Pedro el Viejo, long before Madrid thought of carriages. Narrow and crooked, it runs between the rear of the Carboneras convent and the walls of the Casa de Cisneros. Earlier it was called Calle de los Azotados (“street of the flogged”), and the name was literal: those sentenced to flogging left the town jail and were punished in public along this stretch. A chronicler recovered the case of a man flogged in front of his own house who, unable to sell it out of shame, ended up setting it on fire, the blaze spreading to the neighbouring buildings. The change came in 1835, when the City Council buried the nickname and borrowed the name of the adjoining square, where a cord was carved above the doorway of the old Casas del Cordón, seat of the Puñonrostro family. At number 3 the writer Felipe Picatoste was born; at number 4 lived Eugenio d’Ors.

Its names

  • Calle que baja de la plaza de San Salvador a San Pedro15th-16th centuries (nombre descriptivo)
  • Calle de los Azotados16th centuries-1835
  • Calle del Cordón1835 — presente
Sources (8)

Crossings