Calle del Postigo de San Martín

Calle del Postigo de San Martín, in the very center of Madrid, runs from Plaza de San Martín to Plaza del Callao, hugging the wall of the Descalzas Reales convent. The name preserves the memory of two buildings that no longer exist. The Benedictine monastery of San Martín was the first religious house documented in the town: it appears in a text of 1126. Around it grew the San Martín suburb, the first settlement outside the medieval walls. When the Catholic Monarchs ordered a new wall raised to bring the suburbs within the town, a small gate — a postern — was opened here, right opposite the convent’s doorway. Hence the name. The two buildings that gave the street its meaning both vanished: the church fell in 1810 on the orders of Joseph Bonaparte, and the monastery was erased by Mendizábal’s disentailment in 1836. The street kept its name, recalling a convent and a postern that today’s visitor will no longer see.