The story
On Calle del Arenal, a short walk from the Puerta del Sol, the parish church of San Ginés keeps one of the last pictures El Greco painted of a subject he returned to again and again. In Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, Christ swings a whip through a crowd of traders. This late version, from about 1610, is almost square, unlike the wide horizontal versions now in London, New York and Minneapolis. It once belonged to the Admiral of Castile, one of the great noble collectors of Madrid, and the church's brotherhood of the Holy Christ bought it in 1705.
The parish is very old, already named in a document of King Alfonso VII in 1156. The present church was rebuilt from 1641, after part of the earlier one collapsed on its sandy foundations, and fires in 1724, 1756 and 1824 each brought another round of repair. Off the nave opens the Chapel of the Holy Christ, a small domed church of its own in coloured marble and gilt bronze, finished in 1659 with money from King Philip IV.
The parish registers read like a roll call of Golden Age Madrid. The poet Francisco de Quevedo was baptised here in 1580, and the playwright Lope de Vega married his first wife, Isabel de Urbina, here in 1588.
