Calle del Oso

El Rastro·Embajadores

The name comes from the stone coat of arms that the nobleman Diego de Vera y Ordóñez de Villaquirán kept above the doorway of his house on this street, bearing a bear like the one on Madrid’s town seal. The place name already appears on the Teixeira map of 1656. A legendary version attributes it to a live bear shown by a foreign performer, but the heraldic explanation is the one given by the most reliable sources and by the first known map record.

In the heart of Embajadores, a step from the church of San Cayetano, Calle del Oso runs narrow and short from Calle del Mesón de Paredes to Calle de Embajadores. It measures little; its history does not fit in those few meters. Here stood the houses of Diego de Vera y Ordóñez de Villaquirán, an infantry captain who in 1633 handed his oratory to the Theatines: on the plot they raised the church of San Cayetano, with a doorway by Pedro de Ribera. And Pedro de Ribera himself had been born on this street in 1681, the son of a carpenter, before becoming Madrid’s municipal architect and creator of the Toledo Bridge. Part of the fabric of a corrala from around 1730 survives, one of the most recognizable forms of pre-industrial working-class housing. Since the 1970s the neighbors have celebrated the San Cayetano festival each August with Manila shawls and paper lanterns. Ana Belén, born here in 1951, grew up among those tenements and that festival.

Its names

  • Calle del Osoanterior a 1656
Sources (8)

Crossings