Travesía de Gil Imón

The name evokes a place as much as a person. Here there was an open field known as the portillo or campillo de Gil Imón, an esplanade beside the wall with which Philip IV enclosed Madrid in the seventeenth century, near the convent of San Francisco. The spot took its name from don Baltasar Gil Imón de la Mota, owner of those lands and prosecutor of the Council of Castile. When the city was regularised, the esplanade shrank to this side street, signposted in 1880. The surname carries a Madrid legend. The prosecutor’s daughters, the gilimonas, walked about defying the court’s dress laws, and the neighbourhood began to mock “don Gil and his girls”; from there, tradition says, came a very Madrid swear word. No document supports the story, and etymologists take it for invention. Today the side street is a short stretch of the Imperial district, a step from the avenue of the same name.