King Pedro and the old woman with the oil lamp

What does the legend of the old woman and the lamp say?

The fullest version comes from the Seville annalist Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, in his Annals published in 1677, and he places it in 1354. The king liked to go out alone at night and, on one of those outings, he killed a man, out of harshness or in a quarrel, without a single witness. He took it for granted he'd never be found out.

The body was found, though, and the justices began taking statements from people living nearby. An old woman from a house close by told them that when she heard the clash of swords, she'd leant out, oil lamp in hand. She never saw his face, because he was in disguise. Even so, she was sure: it was the king. She'd recognised a sound that was all his own, the noise his shinbones made as he walked.

It's the ending that made the story famous. The king didn't punish the woman; he rewarded her. And since the heads of criminals were then put on display where they'd committed their crimes, he ordered his own to be set up there, copied in stone.

The details shift depending on who's telling it. For Manuel Chaves, in 1894, it was a brawl with a stranger, and what gave the king away wasn't his shins but his kneecaps.

Cruel king or just king?

Pedro I reigned over Castile in the fourteenth century and left his mark all over Seville, starting with the Alcázar, which he rebuilt. Posterity gave him two opposite nicknames: Pedro the Cruel and Pedro the Just. The main chronicle of his reign was written by Pero López de Ayala, who served his rivals, the Trastámara, and doesn't treat him kindly. In Seville, though, he had passionate defenders. Chaves argued that the king they called Cruel deserved to be known as the Just, and that Philip II had seen it that way too.

That's why the legend of the lamp has lasted so well: it works for both camps at once. It has a king who kills in a dark alley, and a king who, once found out, passes sentence on himself.

How old is the Candilejo legend?

Much younger than the king. The oldest thing we've found about that corner dates from the sixteenth century and, as it's come down to us, it doesn't mention any crime. It's a note by the scholar Argote de Molina: in Calle del Candilejo, in the parish of San Isidoro, there was a head of King Pedro, modelled from life in painted terracotta. So the street already had its name; candilejo means "little oil lamp". According to the historian José Gestoso, the corner had earlier been known as the Cuatro Cantillos, the Four Corners.

The crime appears in writing in the seventeenth century. A Seville author tells it in 1630, "to preserve the tradition", as he puts it. In the same century, a manuscript that Gestoso consulted in the Biblioteca Colombina, the cathedral library, gathers notes on King Pedro "of which memory is kept by tradition". And in 1677 Zúñiga relied on the memoirs of a certain Maestro Medina, from the sixteenth century, which we haven't been able to trace.

Zúñiga had no doubts. He wrote that, although some of the circumstances weren't known, its truth couldn't be questioned, and his proof was the portrait in the street. Notice the logic: the head proves the story, and the story explains the head. Two centuries later, Gestoso was also inclined to accept it, because he could find no other reason why anyone would have put the king's image on that corner. But those are scholars' opinions, not documents. From the king's own time, there's nothing.

What's true about the street and the bust?

Quite a lot, even if it isn't the crime. What's documented is the life of the object.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the house where the old head was kept, which belonged to a city official called Pereda, was in danger of collapsing. Before rebuilding the wall, he reported it to the city council, and the council agreed to pay for a stone half-length figure of the king, in royal dress and insignia and with the arms of Castile and León, to be set in a niche exactly where the old head had been, so that the memory wouldn't be lost. On 24 September 1599, the sculptor Marcos de Cabrera asked the city to appoint someone to examine his work. The order to put it up didn't come until 1608, and in 1612 the accounts were still recording costs. Chaves, writing in 1894, believed it had gone up in 1600.

Not everyone liked the change. The author of 1630 remembered a marble head with "a most beautiful face" and complained that it had been swapped for a half-length figure with "a very different face". There isn't even agreement on what the old head was made of: clay according to Argote, stone according to Zúñiga, marble according to that author.

What happened to the original head?

A witness told the story years later. Juan de Pereda, the official's son, remembered that when he was a boy the Duke of Alcalá, Fernando Enríquez de Ribera, a man of great learning, turned up at the house wanting to know from his father where the ancient head had got to. Eventually they found it, forgotten, in a cellar. The duke, delighted, thanked them and took it away in his carriage, convinced that this piece of clay was the king's true face, or near enough.

The boy described it carefully: painted terracotta, the hair short, cut round and with a fringe, the face clean-shaven and rather full, and a round cap on the head. From those features, Gestoso concluded it was made in the fifteenth century or earlier. Portrait from life or not, it was a very old piece.

Everything suggests the duke in question was Fernando Afán de Ribera, third holder of the title, who lived in the Casa de Pilatos and collected books and antiquities there. According to the same manuscript, the head ended up in his library, among old stones and statues. And there it fell victim to neglect: through the carelessness of the palace keepers, many of those pieces disappeared, and the king's head vanished along with them.

It isn't the only head with a legend on a Seville wall: in the Santa Cruz quarter there's the one in the legend of Susona.

Fact or legend.

• Legend: the crime, the old woman with the lamp and the head as a punishment. Earliest known written versions: 1630 and 1677. No fourteenth-century document.
• Fact: in the sixteenth century there was an old head of the king in Calle del Candilejo (Argote de Molina).
• Fact: the city replaced it with a half-length figure in a niche (made by 1599, installation ordered in 1608).
• Fact (according to a witness): the Duke of Alcalá took the old head to his palace, where it was lost.
• Interpretation: that the head was made no later than the fifteenth century (Gestoso), and that the duke was the third, the one who lived in the Casa de Pilatos.
• Disputed: whether the old head was clay, stone or marble. The two closest accounts, Argote's and the witness's, both say clay.

Where to hear it

The legend is told by the corner with the bust, at the stop "The king, the old woman and the lamp" on the route Central Seville: Legends and Truths, twelve stops through the old centre. The next one, "The head taken by a duke", follows the old head all the way to the duke's palace, where the route ends with "The measurement that didn't add up".

If you're planning your trip, the Seville guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• José Gestoso y Pérez, Sevilla monumental y artística, vol. III, Seville, 1892, pp. 396–401. https://archive.org/details/AGuichot0673
• Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiásticos y seculares de la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla (1677), vol. II, ed. Antonio María Espinosa y Carzel, Madrid, Imprenta Real, 1795, year 1354. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_AFVOJ5vbaaIC
• Manuel Chaves, Páginas sevillanas, Seville, 1894, ch. VII. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40066
• Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli, "Fernando Afán de Ribera (1583-1637)", 3rd Duke of Alcalá. https://fundacionmedinaceli.org/en/?p=228209