Calle de San Lucas

Las Salesas·Justicia

A small altarpiece of the evangelist Saint Luke set above an oven door, behind the estate of the lords of Miñaya, gave the street its name. So Antonio de Capmany records in his historical and etymological study of Madrid’s streets (1863): the street took its name “from another small altarpiece of this holy evangelist that stood behind that same estate of the lords of Miñaya, above the door of the Oven.” The mechanism is the same one that shaped the area’s street names: a small votive image or a devotional tile on the front of an oven or a private property was enough to fix the name residents gave the street. There is no record of a hermitage, chapel or oratory dedicated to the saint on this street.

Calle de San Lucas runs straight through the Justicia neighbourhood, between Calle del Barquillo and Calle de Santo Tomé, barely two hundred metres long. At its northern end stood the estate of the lords of Miñaya, whose oven bore above its door a small altarpiece of the evangelist who gave the street its name. Through the 17th and 18th centuries this whole sector was a patchwork of orchards, convents and noble estates. A few yards off, from 1663, stood the convent of the Mercedarias Descalzas, the nuns known as Las Góngoras. The street’s grandest building is the Casa-palacio del Marqués de Viluma, at number 4, raised in 1857 by Jerónimo de la Gándara and remodelled by Francisco de Cubas, who added a floor and dressed the facades in the Italian manner. The name keeps company with other evangelist streets in the neighbourhood, San Mateo and San Marcos, though no document proves they were named together. In 2021 the street became a single-level surface, giving the pedestrian priority.

Its names

  • Calle de San Lucasanterior a 1863, probablemente 17th century
  • Calle de San Lucas1943-actualidad
Sources (7)

Crossings