Pretil de Santiesteban

A pretil is a sloping alley held up by a stout wall, and this one drops down the rise of San Pedro el Real, in the old fabric of the Cava. The lay of the land shaped it before anyone gave it a surname. That surname came with a woman: Leonor Dávila y Toledo, mother of the 7th count of Santisteban, bought the house here in the late 16th century, and the family lived in it for some two centuries. At the corner with the calle del Nuncio survives the Baroque granite doorway bearing the arms of the Benavides and the Cueva beneath a ducal crown. The surprise is at number 3: the Chapel of the Cuadra de San Isidro, where the saint is said to have kept the oxen of his masters, the Vargas family. Rebuilt in the mid-19th century, it has been a Site of Cultural Interest since 2000 and opens every 15 May. A descendant, Diego de Vargas, viceroy of New Spain, carried devotion to the saint as far as Mexico.

Pedro de Répide identifies at the street’s number an amateur playhouse called Las Musas that operated around 1838 on the ground floor of the ducal palace, after the Dominican nuns of Santa Catalina had left the building. The coincidence of an amateur theatre and a church with miracles of Madrid’s patron saint on the same pretil, within the walls of the same noble family, is one of the details most often remarked on by local chroniclers.