Calle José María Roquero
Recalls José María Roquero Vera, an early twentieth-century priest whom Chamberí called the “social apostle” for his devotion to the poor.
José María Roquero Vera was born in 1879 and died in Madrid in 1912, barely past thirty. He served as a curate at the parish of Santa Teresa and Santa Isabel, next to Chamberí square, and there he poured his work into the poorest residents. The people of Chamberí remembered him with a nickname carved in stone: the “social apostle of Chamberí.”
His early death moved those who had known him. Madrid’s clergy and his own parishioners paid for a commemorative plaque unveiled in 1917.
The street did not always carry his name. It was once called calle de las Delicias, for its nearness to the avenue of the same name, until in the 1920s it was renamed in the priest’s memory. The tribute landed here, in Palos de la Frontera, far from the Chamberí that hailed him as its apostle.