Calle de Santo Tomé

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.

The neighboring street now called Bárbara de Braganza was called for decades “Calle de San José y Santo Tomé,” after a tile on the house of the Princess of Ásculi where both saints were painted. Capmany (1863) clarifies that “this street, which they now call Costanilla de la Veterinaria,” had received that shared name of two dedications. The reform of 1835 detached it from the place name Santo Tomé; the street studied here kept it, so that for a period both parallel streets bore the same hagiographic reference.