Calle de Santa Eulalia

Behind this name is an adolescent girl who died rather than renounce her faith. Tradition places Saint Eulalia around the year 304, during the persecutions of Diocletian, when a girl of about twelve refused to recant before the Roman authorities. The poet Prudentius set down her story a century later, and from there it entered the Hispanic calendar of saints. Two Eulalias vie for the cult. The one from Mérida is the older and more widespread across the south and west of the peninsula. The one from Barcelona, co-patron of the city, has a life story so alike that many scholars regard her as a doubling of the first. The Tetuán plaque does not make clear which of the two it means. Tetuán grew from 1860 as a working-class shantytown beside the old road to France, with no official criterion ordering its streets. In that improvised layout many saints' names appeared, Eulalia among them, given by residents and developers rather than by chroniclers.