Carrera de San Francisco

La Latina·Palacio

The name comes from the Franciscan convent founded outside the walls of Madrid in the 13th century, whose presence gave rise to the outlying district and the road leading up to it from the Puerta de Moros. Legend attributes an early hermitage to Saint Francis of Assisi himself during his 1217 pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, though no medieval document confirms it. What the street names, strictly speaking, is the convent, not the saint directly.

The Carrera de San Francisco runs down from Plaza de la Puerta de Moros to Plaza de San Francisco, in the Palacio district. Its course traces a very old road: the one townspeople followed to reach the Franciscan convent on the western slope, already beyond the medieval wall. Mesonero Romanos called that monastery “the chief cause of the town’s extension between west and south”; the street was the axis along which Madrid grew downhill towards it. The old convent fell in 1760 to make way for the neoclassical church that dominates the street today, completed by Sabatini in 1784. Its circular dome, 33 metres across, is the third widest in Christendom, surpassed only by the Pantheon and St Peter’s in Rome. The disentailment expelled the Franciscans in 1836. Number 2 holds the 18th-century palace of the Duke of Infantado, now the San Pablo CEU Foundation. The even-numbered side also housed the great houses of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, whom Mesonero counted among the district’s grandest.

Its names

  • Camino al convento (sin nombre oficial)13th century – 16th century
  • Campillo de San Francisco17th century (documentado en el plano de Espinosa)
  • Carrera de San Francisco16th century – actualidad
Sources (8)

Crossings