Glorieta de Santa María de la Cabeza

The name comes from a chapel built in the eighteenth century beside this road, consecrated to Saint María de la Cabeza. Each 9 September the chapel drew a pilgrimage that gave life to fields then almost empty, at the start of the road heading down towards Delicias. The saint was a real farm labourer. Wife of Saint Isidore, she lived across the eleventh and twelfth centuries, from a humble family, and popular devotion raised her to the altars long before the Church did. It is said that, to cross the Jarama river on her way to a chapel where she prayed, she would spread her cloak over the water and let it carry her like a boat, without wetting her feet. The avenue that Glorieta de Santa María de la Cabeza heads was barely more than a service track on seventeenth-century plans. The houses around the roundabout did not grow until the last third of the nineteenth century, when the city’s expansion reached Arganzuela.