Travesía del Reloj

Ópera·Palacio

The alley takes its name from the calle del Reloj, its parent street, whose name in turn comes from the sundial (reloj de sol) that presided over the façade of the houses of María de Córdoba y Aragón, lady to Queen Anne of Austria (fourth wife of Philip II) and governess to the infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. The name refers, then, to that timekeeping device — a physical object, not an institution or a person — and reached the alley in 1835, when it dropped its old name of calle del Limón Baja.

The Travesía del Reloj barely raises its head in the Palacio quarter. It links the calle del Reloj with the calle de Fomento and comes out a step from the plaza de la Marina Española. It began as a service alley between the main street and the tangle of passages around the Senate, and that modest role it keeps. Before 1835 it was called calle del Limón Baja, for how little it measured, until it borrowed the name of the street it served. The calle del Reloj carries more history: its houses gave way to the Colegio de Doña María de Aragón, later seat of the Supreme Inquisition and, since 1836, the Palace of the Senate. At number 1 of the alley was born, in 1805, Manuel Patricio Rodríguez Sitches, baritone and singing teacher, brother of the divas María Malibrán and Pauline Viardot. In 1855 he presented to the Royal Society of London the laryngoscope, a device he built from a dentist’s mirror to spy on the inside of his own throat as he sang.

Its names

  • Calle del Limón Baja (vulgo: del Limoncillo)anterior a 1835
  • Travesía del Relojfrom 1835
Sources (8)

Crossings