Calle de Francisco de Asís Méndez Casariego

Francisco de Asís Méndez Casariego (1850-1924), a canon of Madrid’s cathedral, founded in 1885 the Institute of Trinitarian Sisters, a congregation created to help young women in danger. His concern did not stop there: in 1915 he opened the house Porta Coeli, “gate of heaven,” to take in the children who slept and begged in the streets. The Church declared him venerable in 1993. The district that remembers him, El Viso, was laid out in the 1920s and 1930s as an estate of rationalist villas, with quiet streets and dense trees. On that plan survives the name of a man who devoted his final years to those with no roof in Madrid.