Travesía del Almendro

The Travesía del Almendro bends between the calle del Almendro and the calle del Nuncio, in the Palacio quarter. Whoever crosses it treads, unaware, on the foot of the Christian wall Madrid raised around the 11th or 12th century. The name has a clear culprit. An almond tree grew in the garden of Rodrigo de Vargas, a descendant of the Iván de Vargas served by the labourer Madrid would come to venerate as its patron saint. When the street was opened, the tree ended up planted in the middle of the passage, getting in everyone’s way, until in 1742 the magistrate ordered it felled. The alley was born of that very bend: the angled stretch left separate when the street opened its straight exit toward the Cava Baja. Two centuries after the felling, in the 1980s, the city planted almond trees on the street once more. The tree that gave meaning to it all had returned to the place it should never have left.

The almond tree that gave the street its name survived for decades in the middle of the road, already on public ground, until in 1742 the corregidor Marquis of Rafal ordered it felled for obstructing the passage. Peñasco and Cambronero (1889) record the fact without noting any protest from the neighbors, although the street’s property owners had been addressing the Council since 1737 to request traffic improvements: the same petition that justified removing the tree took thirty more years to be achieved with the opening onto the Cava Baja.