Who was San Isidro and why is his feast celebrated in Madrid on May 15 every year? We want to tell you his story and other curiosities of the great Madrid festival. His full name was Isidro de Merlo y Quintana, and his birth was at the end of the 11th century in a very humble agricultural family. He lived with his family in the house that was located on Calle de las Aguas.
Who was San Isidro Labrador
The first job, until the Arab invasion, of Isidro de Merlo y Quintana was that of wellman and later he moved to Torrelaguna to live, marrying María Toribia (who would also later be canonized as Santa María) and having a son named Illán.
They comment that their son fell into a well and Isidro, with all his prayers, managed to raise the water level and thus save his son. To thank this gesture, Isidro and María decided to take a vow of chastity and start living in separate houses.
Later he returned to Madrid and got a job as a farmer on the land of a wealthy family and began to be known as Isidro Labrador.
Divine acts of San Isidro Labrador
It is said that while he was working those lands, his companions complained to the boss about Isidro’s arrival times. The boss decided to check it out and realized that the oxen alone plowed a large part of the field that belonged to Isidro and he understood it as if it were a divine fact. But this did not stop there, since months later and worried about the lands of his employer, he did not rain because the crops did not prosper and with a simple blow of his harada he managed to get a stream of water to supply the entire city .
Another event that was taken as a divine fact was when Isidro organized meals for the poorest in the city, however, on one of the occasions he did not have enough food for everyone and, simply by introducing a stew in the pot, the food was miraculously multiplied.
Isidro was buried in the cemetery of the parish of San Andrés as a poor man but after the insistence of the population thanks to the disclosure of his divine deeds they decided to bury him inside the temple, amazed that, as if it were another miracle, the body remained as it had been buried and even maintained a natural color as if it were alive.