Puente de San Isidro

The name comes from long before the concrete bridge that now spans the Manzanares. On this stretch, until 1900, there was a pontoon bridge of boats known as the pontón de San Isidro, because it served as a shortcut up to the saint’s shrine on the far bank. That floating crossing was left behind, and the place kept the dedication when the present Puente de San Isidro opened to traffic in 1974. Behind the name is Isidore the Labourer, a day worker born in Madrid towards the end of the eleventh century. Tradition remembers him in the service of the Vargas family’s land and credits him with miracles of water and grain: wells that sprang up in drought, a pot that never emptied. The best remembered involved his son, who fell into a well; the waters are said to have risen to the surface and returned him unharmed. Rome canonised him in 1622.