Calle del Olmo

Lavapiés·Embajadores

The name recalls a remarkable elm that grew here until the late 18th century. Pedro de Répide also records a legend that, in the 16th century, four knights fought a duel at the foot of that tree over the rights to the Hospital de Atocha, disputed after Charles V handed the sanctuary to the Dominicans. Popular tradition fused the tree with the event: the elm was witness, and the name stayed.

Calle del Olmo runs between Santa Isabel and Olivar, in the middle of Embajadores, over what were once the orchards of the old Hospital district. Its name recalls a remarkable elm that grew here until the late 18th century. From the mid-19th century it filled with theater people: actors, prompters and comic writers occupied its doorways, so much so that a chronicler called it a street that was “the map and cipher of the working-class swagger of Madrid”. As a girl, the family of Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina”, one of the great dancers of her time, set up a dance academy here; a plaque recalls it. Galdós chose this street to ruin Doña Paca in Misericordia: her descent from elegant Claudio Coello to Olmo, and from there to Saúco and Almendro, traces her social fall down a staircase of botanical place names. In the 1980s the city council planted elms resistant to Dutch elm disease, honoring the name to the letter.

Its names

  • Calle del Olmo17th century – actualidad
Sources (8)

Crossings