Calle de Santa Brígida

Chueca·Justicia

The name comes from the Ward of Santa Brígida, a women’s infirmary of the Hospital of San Antonio Abad that faced this street. The hospital, founded in 1597 by don Lope Gallo de Abellaneda, was run by the regular clergy of San Antonio Abad (the Antonines) until Pope Pius VI suppressed the order in 1787. In 1793-1794 the building passed to the Piarists, who turned it into the Colegio de San Antón. The toponym appears under this name on both Texeira’s map (1656) and Espinosa’s (1769), proving the dedication was already the street’s name from at least the mid-17th century.

Calle de Santa Brígida, in the heart of the Justicia neighbourhood, joins Fuencarral to Hortaleza. Its northern flank belongs to the block of the old Antonine hospital, now home to the College of Architects, whose baroque church Pedro de Ribera raised between 1735 and 1740. That hospital tended contagious diseases and set out its wards under religious dedications; the one facing this street fell under the patronage of the Irish saint who founded women’s monasticism in her land. Hence the name. On the corner with Hortaleza a fountain flowed for centuries. In 1772 Ventura Rodríguez raised there the Fuente de los Galápagos, with two stone turtles; around 1864 it had to be shrunk and the turtles gave way to two dolphins. Since then it has been called the Fuente de los Delfines. On that same block, between 1811 and 1813, a nine-to-eleven-year-old Victor Hugo lived as a boarder, when the French had turned the Piarist school into a Seminary of Nobles.

Its names

  • Calle de Santa Brígidaanterior a 1656 – actualidad
Sources (11)

Crossings