Plaza del Humilladero

In the heart of the old Morería, this square appeared as its own space on neither Texeira’s 1656 map nor Espinosa’s of 1769: both merged it with the Plaza de San Andrés or that of Puerta de Moros. Only in the late 18th century did it acquire a name, and until 1881 it was a little square, not a full one. A humilladero was the cross or holy image set at the entrance and exit of towns so travelers would bare their heads as they passed. The Confraternity of the Vera Cruz, based in the Franciscan convent, chose this spot as the start of its Good Friday Vía Crucis, which left San Francisco el Grande and ended at the town’s Calvary. As one of the few open gaps in the medieval maze, each August it took in much of the bustle of the Verbena de la Paloma festival. And here Agustina de Aragón lived in her final years, on the calle del Humilladero, as one of the city’s diamond-shaped plaques recalls.

In 1639, when the Discalced Trinitarian nuns undertook the reform and rebuilding of their convent on Calle Cantarranas (now Lope de Vega), they moved temporarily to a house on Calle del Humilladero. The fact carries some weight: Cervantes had been buried in that convent in April 1616, and his body remained there through the following decades. The proximity of the two circumstances —⁠the tomb of the author of Don Quixote and the nuns' stay on this street⁠— is not a direct link, but it places the road at the heart of the institutional movements of literary Madrid in the seventeenth century.