Calle San Daniel

Behind the name is a southern Italian of the thirteenth century. Daniel led the Franciscan province of Calabria when, in 1227, a year after Francis of Assisi died, he joined six friars set on preaching the Gospel in North Africa. They left Tarragona and crossed to Ceuta, then under Almohad rule. They preached without permission, were arrested and, when they refused to embrace Islam, the governor ordered their death: all seven were beheaded on October 10 of that same year. Pope Leo X canonized them in 1516, and Saint Daniel became the patron of Ceuta. Why Madrid chose to remember him in this corner of Chopera has not been documented. The street is short, in an Arganzuela neighborhood that grew in the shadow of the Manzanares and the old pastures of the Dehesa de Arganzuela. Whoever walks it today treads the name of a martyr whose reliquary is venerated, several centuries and a strait away, in the cathedral of Ceuta.