Calle del Mediodía Chica

La Latina·Palacio

The name comes from the Cerros del Mediodía, a rise in the ground south of the medieval town that took its name from the sun’s orientation. According to the tradition recorded by Peñasco and Cambronero (1889), that hillock already existed under Arab rule, and at its foot ran the road leading to the Mozarabic farmsteads along the river. The shorter street took the label “Chica” (small) to distinguish itself from its parallel, the Mediodía Grande.

Calle del Mediodía Chica, at barely 89 metres, closes an axis that once ran towards the Manzanares from Madrid’s old southern hillock. It joins Calle del Mediodía Grande with Calle de Calatrava, in the Palacio district. The name comes from looking at the sky: at midday the sun peaks to the south, and that orientation named the rise where two parallel streets were opened, the Grande and the Chica. Tradition placed on that hillock a marker of the road linking the town with the Mozarabic settlements of the lower Manzanares. The 1656 Texeira map already shows the layout, but without a label; by 1769 it appears with its present name. In the early twentieth century literary attention went to the Grande, with its disreputable inns; the Chica, shorter, inspired no such writing, though it shared the same modest residential character.

Its names

  • Sin nombre registrado1656
  • Calle del Mediodía Chica1769
Sources (9)

Crossings