Calle del Mesón de Paños

In July 1835, a house on this street was pulled down, and the falling rubble uncovered a stretch of city wall with a semicircular tower. It belonged to Madrid’s second medieval wall, the Christian rampart of the 12th and 13th centuries, and Calle del Mesón de Paños runs right over what was once its outer moat. The façade of number 13 still bears the mark of one of those defensive towers. Before this name took hold, the street was known as de las Fuentes and de los Tintes. Dyers clustered here, pushed toward the city gates by municipal ordinances along with the other trades that made noise or stank. The present name comes from the inn where cloth merchants from the Royal Cloth Factory of Guadalajara used to stay. Each is said to have left a tile bearing a saying about the textile trade, until the place became a gallery of proverbs and images of cloth. The inn vanished; the name held on and became official in 1835.