Calle del Norte

Malasaña·Universidad

The name simply describes the street’s geographic orientation. There is no record of any earlier name, nor of any historical reference beyond the compass point itself. As one chronicle of the neighborhood puts it, “a name whose only ancestor is its geography”.

Calle del Norte runs steeply south, its cobbles worn, from Calle de Quiñones down to Calle del Noviciado. The slope ends in front of the Monastery of Montserrat, that Baroque building on San Bernardo which for nearly eighty years housed not monks but prisoners: after the Disentailment of 1836 it served as a women’s prison, La Galera, until the Benedictines returned in 1914. The name holds almost no mystery: it marks a compass point and little more. So plainly descriptive was it that the chroniclers of Madrid’s streets gave it neither anecdotes nor etymological disputes. Life, however, arrived by night. In June 1960 the flamenco tablao Las Brujas opened at number 15, set up in an old bottle warehouse with an arched cellar. Camarón de la Isla, Lole Montoya, Cristina Hoyos and Juan Habichuela all passed across its stage. It closed its doors in 1982.

Its names

  • Calle del Nortec. 1750 – actualidad
Sources (9)

Crossings