Calle de las Huertas
After the huertas del Prado, the market gardens that in the 16th and 17th centuries supplied the town with fruit and vegetables, beside the meadow of the Jerónimos monastery. It is a name from the landscape, not from a person.
The market gardens that name this street have no certain owner. Some credit the Marquis of Castañeda, a gentleman of Henry IV; other versions place them in the hands of the friars of San Jerónimo, and some hold they belonged to both. The gardens of the San Sebastián cemetery are also recalled here.
What did take hold was the name of the whole quarter. The neighbouring streets, once of gardeners and actors, gradually took the names of the great writers of the Golden Age, and the district came to be known as the Barrio de las Letras, the Quarter of Letters.
Isidoro Máiquez lived on this street and took part in the uprising of 2 May 1808; in his honor the City Council gave the street his name between 1840 and 1841, though the designation lasted barely a year before the historic name was restored.
Its names
- Camino de las Huertash. 17th century
- Calle de las Huertash. 17th century – 1840
- Calle de Máiquez1840–1841
- Calle de las Huertas1841 – actualidad
Sources (7)
- Calle de las Huertas — Wikipedia
- Calle de Huertas — Flaneando por Madrid (cita a Répide)
- Calle de las Huertas — Las calles del viejo Madrid
- Répide, Pedro de – Las calles de Madrid (ed. La Librería, 2011)
- Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de – El antiguo Madrid (1861), cap. XV
- Peñasco de la Puente, Hilario y Cambronero, Carlos – Las calles de Madrid (1889), BNE Digital
- Por las calles de Madrid – Calle de las Huertas