Calle del Pez

Malasaña·Universidad

The name comes from a stone-carved fish on the façade of a 17th-century private house, commissioned by Juan Coronel in memory of his daughter Blanca, who had tended in vain the last fish of a pond dried out by building work. The house was called “Casa del Pez” and the name spread to the street. The stretch nearest San Bernardo kept the separate name “Calle de la Fuente del Cura” until the late 18th century.

Calle del Pez comes down from the Universidad quarter, the old Maravillas, linking the Corredera Baja de San Pablo with Calle de San Bernardo. On the Texeira map it was not even a single street: the first stretch was already Calle del Pez; the rest appeared as Calle de la Fuente del Cura, after a cleric who opened his gardens to the neighbors on St. John’s day to watch the fountains play. The name that won out comes from an event in the first third of the 17th century. Juan Coronel bought a plot with a pond of colored fish, which died off as the workmen drew water to mix plaster. His daughter Blanca rescued the last one in a glass jar, but the animal died anyway. To console her, her father had a stone fish carved on the corner of the house, still visible at number 24. Life on the street ran thick. Here in 1623 the convent of San Plácido was founded, the scene of two scandals that reached the court: nuns accused of collective demonic possession and a nighttime visit by Philip IV that ended in an Inquisitorial rebuke of the king himself.

Its names

  • Calle de la Fuente del Cura (tramo Pozas–San Bernardo)Siglo 17th – late 18th century
  • Calle del Pez (tramo Corredera–Pozas)Documentada desde al menos 1656
  • Calle de Moriones (o Calle Domingo Moriones y Murillo)1868–1874
  • Calle del PezDesde 1874 hasta hoy
Sources (10)

Crossings