Lavapiés Street, formerly Real de Lavapiés, is a street in the Embajadores neighbourhood in the Centro district of Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain.
In the 18th century it was also known as Avapiés Street due to the influence of the farces of Don Ramón de la Cruz, returning to its old name in the 19th century. Next to the neighbouring Plaza de Lavapiés, it may have housed one of the earliest Jewish quarters of Madrid, and has been considered the cradle of the majesty of Madrid’s traditionalism and the “manolería”.
It goes up from Plaza de Lavapiés to Calle de la Magdalena, taking residents from the old neighbourhoods of Ministriles, Lavapiés and Jesús y María, from the parish of San Lorenzo in the disappeared municipal district of the Hospital.
The chronicler Pedro de Répide defined it as “a street of majesty, map and cipher of the manolería”, and two centuries earlier Philip III of Spain had granted it the privilege of being called ‘Real’, when the monarch attended the festivities of reparation to the Christ of the Olive.
Ramón de Mesonero Romanos can be considered the first guide to the Real de Lavapiés and its surroundings. Following in his footsteps, the aforementioned Répide begins the route of the street at the top of Magdalena, where it begins narrow, and after passing Calle de la Cabeza it widens into what was called Plazuela de Ludones. In that enclave lived a comedian, Elena Ossorio, one of the three daughters of the actor Jerónimo Velázquez, first loved and then defamed by Lope de Vega after a fight at the door of the lady’s house with another friend and frequent visitor of the Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez and Miguel de Cervantes.
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