Calle de Matilde Landa

This road crosses Almenara from the Castellana to the Vía Límite, and since 2018 has borne the name of Matilde Landa Vaz, which replaced on its plaques that of a military officer who rebelled in 1936, General Aranda. The change came with the removal of Francoist symbols from Madrid’s streets. Matilde Landa was born in Badajoz in 1904, into a freethinking family that did not baptize her. She studied Natural Sciences in Madrid, joined the Communist Party and, during the Civil War, worked in the Socorro Rojo relief organization. After the fall of the Republic, the party appointed her to reorganize it inside the country. She was arrested in April 1939. Her death left one of the most remembered images of postwar repression. Imprisoned at the Can Sales penitentiary in Palma de Mallorca, she was subjected to sustained pressure to accept Catholic baptism, and the authorities prepared a public ceremony. On September 26, 1942, Landa threw herself into the prison’s inner courtyard. As she lay dying, unconscious, she was baptized in articulo mortis.