Travesía del Biombo

Travesía del Biombo is the shortest street in Madrid: fourteen metres and twenty-five centimetres from end to end. It runs through the Palacio quarter between the calle de Juan de Herrera and the plaza del Biombo, brushing the south side of San Nicolás de los Servitas, the oldest medieval-structured church in the city. The name is shared by the three streets that surround the church and comes from a nearby convent, that of the Salutation of Our Lady, which the people of Madrid called “of Constantinople”. The “biombo” (screen) was no object, but the convent’s rear wall: its breaks and angles in plan sketched the outline of a folded screen, and so the people christened it. The alley appears in the municipal street registry from 11 January 1835, a year before the convent fell. The name had passed from mouth to mouth long before, and was fixed just as the building that inspired it was about to disappear.