Travesía de los Cabestreros

Travesía de los Cabestreros is a short, broken street linking Calle de los Cabestreros with Calle de Embajadores, in that Madrid of workshops and stables that spread toward the Rastro. The name comes from a now-vanished trade. The cabestrero spun hemp into cord and braided it into halters and lead ropes for pack mules. The guild gathered here from the 18th century and even raised a chapel to its patron, Saint Anthony the Abbot, in the church of San Cayetano. From that devotion came a striking festival: on Saint Anthony’s day, the neighborhood’s Roma led their harnessed mules to the door of San Cayetano to receive the blessed barley. At its meeting with Mesón de Paredes, the 1769 map shows the Cabestreros fountain, which locals called de los Machos because they believed its waters granted virility. And on the neighboring block stands the tenement where, it is said, Pedro de Ribera, the Churrigueresque master builder, was born and had his workshop.