The stone cross at this crossroads marks the spot where one of the gates of the walled city once stood, and that gate is called Puerta Cerrada, the closed gate, for the simplest reason you can imagine: so much thieving and robbing went on here that the city decided to keep it shut at night.
It had carried prettier names before, because the keystone of the arch was carved with a dragon, which is why people called it the gate of the serpent. As the city spread out beyond its walls, the gate opened again to connect the new outer districts with the centre, and there you have the joke that seventeenth-century writers like and simply couldn't resist: an open gate that was called Closed.
In 1582 it burned down completely, and refused to have it rebuilt because by then the city stretched far beyond it. Archaeologists reckon the real gate stood a little further west than this cross, somewhere towards the Cava Baja you just walked through.
From the crossroads we take the Calle de Segovia west and turn left up the Costanilla de San Pedro, towards the brick tower that rises above the rooftops.
Sources. Story: Hispanopedia, Puerta Cerrada (Madrid); León Pinelo, Anales de Madrid; Ayuntamiento de Madrid, esMadrid. Photos: Photo of the cross at Puerta Cerrada: Tamorlan, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
