Calle del Padre Francisco Palau y Quer

Behind the name is a Catalan friar of turbulent life. Francisco Palau y Quer was born in Aitona, Lleida, in 1811, and took the Discalced Carmelite habit in 1832, when the disentailment laws were beginning to empty the monasteries. He spent years exiled in France and confined for political reasons, preaching popular missions wherever he was allowed. Exile took him to Ibiza, and from Ibiza to the islet of Es Vedrà, an uninhabited crag off the coast where he withdrew for spells of silence. At Es Cubells he built a hermitage with the image of the Virgin of the Virtues, the island’s first Marian shrine. He also worked as an exorcist and even dreamed of an order devoted to that ministry. His greatest mark were his foundations: around 1860 he set up in the Balearics the congregation that would give rise to the Carmelite Missionaries. He died in Tarragona in 1872, and John Paul II beatified him in 1988.