Calle de Santa Magdalena Sofía

Madeleine Sophie Barat was born in 1779 in Joigny, in French Burgundy. Her education was in the hands of a demanding older brother, who had her study Latin, Greek, history and mathematics when a girl of her time would usually go no further than basic reading. At barely twenty she founded the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a congregation devoted to the education of girls. The order opened more than a hundred houses across France, Italy, England, Austria and Switzerland before she died in Paris in 1865. The Church proclaimed her a saint in 1925, and from that recognition the street takes its name. The street runs out beside the Sagrado Corazón school in Chamartín, run by the very order she founded, so that the sign and the school share the same origin.