Ribera de Curtidores: The Tanners' Slope and El Rastro
Why is it significant?
Feel the slope under your feet as the street drops away toward the old city edge, lined with antique dealers, junk shops, galleries of old furniture and shuttered doorways.
Key Facts
| Place | Ribera de Curtidores: The Tanners' Slope and El Rastro |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de la Ribera de Curtidores, 28005 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.40750, -3.70680 |
| Part of Walk | Tapas, Tripe and the Sunday Rastro: La Latina & Lavapiés, Madrid's Old Popular Quarters |
| Generated | Generated |
Feel the slope under your feet as the street drops away toward the old city edge, lined with antique dealers, junk shops, galleries of old furniture and shuttered doorways. On a Sunday morning you would barely see the pavement: every metre is covered by stalls, awnings and a slow, shuffling river of people.
The name tells you what this place used to smell like. Curtidores are tanners. From the sixteenth century, the city's slaughterhouse stood close by and the tanneries lined the street below it. And rastro means trail. One popular explanation says the word came from the trail of blood left as carcasses were dragged down to the tanners. Another says rastro simply meant the slaughterhouse district itself. Either way, it is not a romantic origin.
Second-hand trading grew up around the tanneries, and by the eighteenth century the Rastro was famous enough for the playwright Ramón de la Cruz to set a comic sketch here. Today it fills this street and the lanes around it every Sunday and public holiday morning, with around a thousand stalls: vinyl records, military buttons, birdcages, tiles, broken radios, someone's grandmother's lace. An old Madrid joke says that if something was stolen from you on Saturday night, you can buy it back here on Sunday morning.
And when the stalls begin to pack up in the early afternoon, Madrid performs one of its most sacred rituals: la hora del vermú, vermouth hour. Sweet red vermouth, ideally poured from a tap, over ice with a slice of orange and an olive, and a dash of soda from a siphon if you like. It is less a drink than an appetite starter before a long Sunday lunch.
Watch the faces around you: bargaining here is a sport, and nobody pays the first price without a fight. Near the bottom of the street, turn left and work your way east through the side streets to Calle de Embajadores, where a long and very serious brick building fills a whole block.