Calle Válgame Dios

Chueca·Justicia

The name comes from a religious exclamation. A legend, recorded by 19th-century Madrid chroniclers (Mesonero Romanos, Pedro de Répide), places it in the last years of Philip II’s reign or thereabouts: two men asked a Franciscan friar from the convent of San Francisco el Grande to attend a dying woman. In the ravine to which he was led, where a woman and her newborn son were being held captive, the victim cried “¡Válgame Dios!” (God help me!) just as the lay brother accompanying the prior overpowered the captors. The spot, still beyond the walls and unbuilt, became known by that cry for help. When the area was developed, the street inherited the ravine’s name. In 1835, the municipal renaming reform made the popular name official, replacing the earlier administrative name, “Santa Bárbara la Vieja”.

Between the streets of Augusto Figueroa and Gravina, in the Justicia quarter, hides a street barely a hundred metres long with one of the most exclamatory names in Madrid. In 1769 it appeared as calle de Santa Bárbara la Vieja. The present name is said to come from a ravine that crossed the land: whoever skirted it let out the exclamation that ended up naming the place. The 1835 renaming reform made official what the street already said in everyone’s mouth. Number 3 holds a coincidence no planner would have designed. There the painter Eduardo Rosales died in 1873, at thirty-six, worn down by tuberculosis; in that same doorway the engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo lived and died. A painter consumed in his youth and an inventor who reached old age, at the same number of a street you can walk in a minute. Galdós set the house of don Elías here in La Fontana de Oro, and Carmen Mola named it again in La Bestia: a hundred and fifty years separate the two mentions.

Its names

  • Calle de Santa Bárbara la Vieja1769 (documentado en plano de Espinosa)
  • Calle de Válgame Dios1835 – actualidad
Sources (8)

Crossings