Calle de los Mártires Concepcionistas
The street remembers fourteen Franciscan Conceptionist nuns executed during the religious persecution of 1936, ten of them from the monastery of San José that stood on this very street. The City Council approved the name change on 14 June 1946, replacing the earlier Calle de Sagasti.
When this street opened within the Salamanca Ensanche, it did not carry the name on today’s plaque. It was Calle de Sagasti, after a Navarrese lawyer and politician who served as civil governor of Madrid.
Around 1890, number 19 housed the monastery of San José de las Concepcionistas Franciscanas. The nuns were living there when the Civil War broke out. On 19 July 1936 they left the convent and sought refuge on Calle de Francisco Silvela. On the night of 7 November, it is said a neighbour denounced them, and the militiamen loaded them onto a truck. That group numbered fourteen women, ten of them from San José. All fourteen were beatified in 2019.
The City Council honoured them long before: on 14 June 1946 it erased the Sagasti name and renamed the street Calle de los Mártires Concepcionistas, the name a tourist reads today across from the doorway where that truck journey began.
Its names
- Calle de Sagastic. 1870-1946
Sources (5)
- ACI Prensa — Historia de las 14 mártires concepcionistas beatificadas
- COPE — Las 14 concepcionistas martirizadas, ya beatas (2019)
- Archidiócesis de Madrid — Las mártires concepcionistas dieron sus vidas por la fe
- Libertad Digital — Unas monjas desaparecidas en vida, ¿y también del callejero? (2015)
- Real Academia de la Historia — Luis Sagasti García Herreros