Calle de San Sebastián

This street in central Madrid owes its name to the parish that still stands on it. Before the church there was a hermitage at one side of the road that led to Atocha. On that modest structure, between 1554 and 1575, rose the church dedicated to San Sebastián, which in the height of the Golden Age became the religious centre of the neighbourhood. Some of the great names of Spanish letters passed through its naves. There, in 1635, Lope de Vega was buried, his remains eventually lost to a common grave once the burial fee went unpaid: the author of hundreds of plays vanished into the anonymity of a collective tomb over an unpaid bill. Beside the church stretched the old cemetery and the chapel of the Virgen de la Novena, venerated as patron of stage actors, in the same corner where Lope had rested before his trace was lost.