Calle de Santo Tomé
The street takes its name from Santo Tomé (the apostle Thomas), a devotion that spread through the area via images and shrines on the façades of houses, common practice around the Salesas during the 17th and 18th centuries. The pattern is identical to that of the adjacent Calle de San Lucas.
Calle de Santo Tomé runs barely a hundred meters between Plaza de las Salesas and Calle de San Lucas, in the Justicia neighborhood. It is one of the shortest streets in the area, now part of the pedestrian single-platform grid.
The name reflects a very Madrid devotional custom: naming a street after the apostle or evangelist whose image presided over a shrine or a tile on some house along the stretch. The proof is right next door. The nearby Calle de Bárbara de Braganza was once called San José y Santo Tomé because a house bore a tile painted with both saints.
Around it, the neighborhood keeps its aristocratic air among 19th-century mansions and the Palace of Justice, today the Supreme Court. Since the late 20th century the street has been one of the marks of creative Madrid, with galleries, restaurants and design shops.
Its names
- Calle de Santo Toméanterior a 1863 — presente
Sources (6)
- Capmany, Antonio de: Origen histórico y etimológico de las calles de Madrid (1863) — Internet Archive
- Callejero oficial con numeración vigente e histórica — Ayuntamiento de Madrid (datos abiertos)
- Plaza de las Salesas — Wikipedia (delimitación geográfica)
- Madrid: sus viejas calles — Bárbara de Braganza (blog callesdemadrid.blogspot.com)
- Wikidata — Calle de Santo Tomé, Madrid (Q29413220)
- Guía de Arquitectura de Madrid — Santo Tome (Calle), COAM