Calle de San José

The street runs tight against the wall of the convent of the Trinitarias Descalzas, and that wall holds one of Madrid’s worst-kept secrets: beneath the convent floor lies Miguel de Cervantes, buried there in 1616. The author of Don Quixote chose the spot out of gratitude to the Trinitarian order, which years earlier had helped ransom him from captivity in Algiers. Within those walls also lived Marcela de San Félix, daughter of Lope de Vega, who took vows as a nun and stayed for life while her father filled the playhouses a few steps away. In 1868 the building nearly fell to the wrecking bar, saved by the writer Mariano Roca de Togores and the chronicler Ramón de Mesonero Romanos. Exactly where the alley’s name comes from was never recorded. The chronicles stay silent on the saint who named it.