Calle de San Vicente Ferrer: Tiled Shopfronts of Old Maravillas
Why is it significant?
Ignore the shop windows for a moment and study the walls at this corner: panels of painted ceramic tiles, in blue, yellow and green, advertising an old pharmacy and the cures it once promised for everyday ailments, with curly lettering and little painted scenes.
Key Facts
| Place | Calle de San Vicente Ferrer: Tiled Shopfronts of Old Maravillas |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de San Vicente Ferrer, 28004 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.42560, -3.70380 |
| Part of Walk | From the Dos de Mayo to La Movida: Malasaña & Chueca, Madrid's Rebel Quarters |
| Generated | Generated |
Ignore the shop windows for a moment and study the walls at this corner: panels of painted ceramic tiles, in blue, yellow and green, advertising an old pharmacy and the cures it once promised for everyday ailments, with curly lettering and little painted scenes. They are a hundred years old, give or take, and they have outlived almost everything they advertised.
Before neon signs and radio jingles, a tile panel was the smartest advertising a Madrid shopkeeper could buy. Rain could not wash it off, the sun could not fade it, and the whole street read it every day. In the early twentieth century, pharmacies, dairies, taverns and grocers across the city dressed their façades in ceramics. Most disappeared with the shops behind them. Walk along San Vicente Ferrer and the streets around it and you will spot the survivors.
On paper this neighbourhood is called Universidad. Historically it was the Barrio de Maravillas, a quarter of artisans and of the chisperos, the blacksmiths' lads named after the sparks of their forges. By the 1960s and 1970s it had grown old and tired: crumbling flats, elderly tenants, shuttered shops, and very cheap rents.
And cheap rents are where music begins. After Franco's death in 1975, students, painters, photographers and kids with second-hand guitars moved into these streets. Bars opened in former dairies and taverns, bands rehearsed in basements, fanzines were photocopied in kitchens. Within a few years this grid of narrow streets had become one of the cradles of what the world would call La Movida madrileña.
There is a bitter irony in those pharmacy tiles. The same years that brought freedom also brought heroin, and the Movida generation lost many of its own to it. The neighbourhood remembers both. Now walk north up Calle de San Andrés into the square where this barrio's story really starts.