Plaza de Ministriles

Lavapiés·Embajadores

The name derives from the noun “ministril,” which in the 16th and 17th centuries meant the wind musicians hired for religious and civil events. The parent street, from which the square takes its name, formed in the early 17th century during the town’s southward expansion. Pedro de Répide attributed the name to a bailiffs' guardhouse, taking the legal sense of the term; other later scholars have argued the musical sense to be more plausible for the period and setting.

The Plaza de Ministriles is young: it opened in February 2007 on a 525-square-metre plot left by a ruined building, between the streets of Lavapiés and Ministriles. Before existing as a square, this corner appeared on no map. It borrowed the name of the street beside it. And that street does have a history. It was born in the 17th century, when Madrid was spilling southward. The word “ministril” hides two meanings and no one agrees on which named the street. One tradition holds that the guardhouse of the town’s bailiffs stood there — lesser officials so modest they were called ministriles — with cells alongside. The other reading dismantles the first: in the 17th century a ministril was almost always a wind musician. One piece of evidence tips the scale: a 1625 tax document records on this street the house of a certain Oliva, described as a ministril. The musicians lived here before any chronicle mentioned the bailiffs.

Its names

  • Calle de los Ministrilesearly 17th century
  • Calle de Ministriles18th-19th century
  • Plaza de Ministriles2007
Sources (8)

Crossings