Calle del Rosario

A narrow street of the Palacio quarter that descends from the Gran Vía de San Francisco to the Cuesta de las Descargas. It already appears with this name on the Texeira map of 1656, so it has been called the same for some three and a half centuries. The name comes from the devotion that most stirred Baroque Madrid. Before dawn, the processions of the Rosario de la Aurora set out: rows of neighbors lit by lanterns making their way through the quarter while the city slept. The confraternity started from a chapel of the Franciscan convent dedicated to the Virgin of the Dawn, whose door opened right onto this little street, and the procession ended up lending its devotion to the whole way. At the northern end stood the house of Baltasar Gil Imón de la Mota, prosecutor of the Royal Council and governor of the Council of the Treasury under Philip IV. His residence marked the map: the gate that opened in the wall at the end of the street came to be called Portillo de Gilimón.

On a date not pinned down exactly by the sources (eighteenth century, probably the second third), the procession of the Rosario de la Aurora of San Francisco —⁠36 lanterns⁠— met, at the narrowing of the old Calle de los Remedios, the confraternity of the Hospital of Santa Catalina de los Donados, carrying its own procession with lanterns. As neither confraternity would give way, “they set about each other with their lanterns, producing an uproar and commotion that only the presence of the Walloon Guard could contain”. The Council and the mayors of the Casa y Corte suppressed the procession. From the incident the Spanish language kept the expression “it ended like the Rosario de la Aurora”, recorded by the Real Academia Española. Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, a disciple of Goya, immortalized the scene around 1860 in an oil painting held in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection; José García Ramos painted the same subject years later.