Calle Nuestra Señora de las Angustias

Behind the name lies a concrete image: Mary receiving in her lap the body of her son just taken down from the cross. The devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows captures that moment of grief, and from the late Middle Ages it took root in Spanish popular piety. Its best-known emblem is the Virgin’s heart pierced by swords, one for each sorrow. The street was born from a plan, not a parish. It belongs to the Colonia Alfonso XIII, also called Colonia de los Rosales, built around 1928 by a cooperative of municipal workers on what was still the independent town of Chamartín de la Rosa: low houses with front and back gardens, arranged around a circular square. From that center, like spokes, run the avenida del Recuerdo and the streets of Levante, Poniente, Hiedra and this Nuestra Señora de las Angustias. Barely sixty meters for one of the most sorrowful devotions on the calendar, in a colony that still breathes the village air it had before Madrid swallowed it up.