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.

The fountain at the junction of Calle de los Cabestreros with Mesón de Paredes was nicknamed Fuente de los Machos because of the popular belief that its water conferred extraordinary virility. The saying circulated in the neighborhood: “Este es un macho porque ha bebido el agua de Cabestreros” [This one is a stud because he has drunk the water of Cabestreros]. The fountain already appears on Texeira’s map of 1656 (plate 18, number 53) and Mesonero Romanos documents it in 1862 also supplying the convent of Santa Catalina de Siena. The Republican version of 1934, which preserves the inscription “República Española — Ayuntamiento de Madrid,” survived Francoism through municipal oversight and is today a rarity in Madrid’s public space.