Calle Doctor Letamendi

The street plunges steeply from Plaza del Cordón down to Calle de Segovia, so steep that residents nicknamed it Tentetieso (“stay upright”). It is one of the oldest descents in the old town, already drawn on Texeira’s 1656 map. At number 1 stood the ancestral house of Iván de Vargas, whom Saint Isidore the Laborer served as a farmhand, according to tradition. In 1912 the ear-and-throat doctor Rafael Forns bought the house and turned it into a museum; it was he who got the street renamed around 1940 in honor of his teacher, the physician and humanist José de Letamendi (Barcelona, 1828 – Madrid, 1897), author of the maxim “the doctor who knows only medicine does not even know medicine.” The irony is that Letamendi never lived here. The house of Iván de Vargas was demolished in 2002; a public library bearing his name opened in its place.