Calle Santa Matilde

Behind the name is a queen who preferred hospitals to the throne. Matilda of Ringelheim was born around the year 892 in Saxon lands and raised among the nuns of the convent where her grandmother was abbess. She married young to Henry I, Duke of Saxony, nicknamed the Fowler, who would become king of Germany. From that marriage came a whole dynasty: her son Otto was crowned emperor. Widowed and powerful, she spent her share of the inheritance founding monasteries and aiding the sick and the destitute, to the point that her own children reproached her generosity. She died in Quedlinburg in 968, and the people venerated her as a saint almost from the first day. Why this Bellas Vistas street took her name went undocumented. It fits the custom of naming the streets of late nineteenth-century Tetuán after female saints. Today it is a short stretch, barely sixty meters, in a corner of the neighborhood.