Calle Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Calle de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe carries a name that in fact holds two very different stories, separated by an ocean and almost four centuries, joined only by a word. The first is from Extremadura. In the Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, in Cáceres, a 12th-century Romanesque wooden carving barely 59 centimetres tall is venerated. The name comes from the Arabic wādi, ‘river’. Alfonso XI credited it with his victory at the Battle of Río Salado in 1340, and in return promoted the enlargement of the monastery. The second story is born on the other side of the Atlantic, in 1531: tradition tells that a man named Juan Diego saw the Virgin appear on Tepeyac hill, in what is now Mexico, and that image became the patron of all Latin America. The street was born much closer to home. La Guindalera began to be developed in 1874, and its first church opened in 1883. The street, about 243 metres long, appears in neither Mesonero Romanos nor the chroniclers of the early 20th century, a sign that the sign went up after the first third of the century.