Calle de Beatriz Galindo

The street curves up the slope of Las Vistillas, from Segovia to San Buenaventura, in the Palacio district. Everyone places it in La Latina, and that is where it gets curious: the whole neighbourhood is named after a woman who never lived on this street. Beatriz Galindo, called “La Latina” for her command of classical Latin, came to Madrid as the widow of the Artillero, artillery captain to the Catholic Monarchs. She carried through the pious foundations the couple had planned, among them the Hospital de la Concepción, near the calle de Toledo. Her fame was such that people began calling the hospital “de la Latina,” and the nickname passed first to the building and then to the whole district. The irony remains. The street bearing her name lies west of all that, on a slope she is never recorded to have set foot on. The woman who named half a district ended up with her own street in the most out-of-the-way corner of Las Vistillas.

The alabaster tombs of Beatriz Galindo and Francisco Ramírez that were kept in the Convent of the Concepción Jerónima were in fact four: two in the hospital and two in the convent. All of them remained empty throughout their history, which makes them cenotaphs without a body. After the complex was demolished in 1904, the tombs passed to the Municipal Museum, and in 1965 they were moved to the cemetery of El Goloso, where they remain.