Calle Ministriles Chica

Lavapiés·Embajadores

The name derives from the ministriles who had premises on the adjoining main street (Calle de Ministriles) in the early 17th century. The exact identity of those ministriles is the point in dispute: Répide and later tradition identify them with the bailiffs or lesser officers of justice of the town, while the researcher Carlos Osorio (caminandopormadrid.com) argues that in that period the term meant exclusively wind musicians who played at religious ceremonies and banquets. Calle Ministriles Chica is a side street off the main one, and takes its name from it with no distinct identity of its own.

A short street with no glory of its own: it exists only to stitch together two parallel streets, Calle de Ministriles and Calle de Lavapiés, in Embajadores. It inherited the name of the larger one with the diminutive stuck on behind, and seems never to have had any earlier identity. The name hides a puzzle that is still debated. One version points to the town’s bailiffs, known as ministriles, with a small guardhouse and cells next to their homes: the ministril was the lowest rung of the justice system. The other sounds better, literally: the same word meant the wind musicians — shawms, cornetts, sackbuts — who played in churches and great ceremonies. Perhaps the street was named for the shawms, not the cells. The painter’s brush passed through these houses too: on 22 February 1646 the Baroque painter Antonio de Monreal died here, a man who had aspired to the post of painter to the king. The name lives on in the quarter: in 2007 the Plaza de Ministriles was opened on the site of a ruined building, right at the level of this little street.

Its names

  • Calle Ministriles Chica17th century – actualidad
Sources (10)

Crossings