Pasaje de Dolores

Dolores began as a woman’s name from a devotion to the Virgin Mary: Our Lady of Sorrows, the Mother who accompanies her son’s suffering. The iconography fixes her with a dagger driven into her breast, or seven, one for each of the sorrows that medieval devotion went on counting. From that devotion came the given name that thousands of Spanish women carried for generations, almost always shortened to Lola. Which of the two weighed most when this alley was named has not survived on record. The Prosperidad district was parceled out from 1862, when the investor Próspero Soynard cut a farm into small plots bought by bricklayers and carpenters. In those modest settlements women’s names abounded in the street map without the council ever noting down the reason. Dolores may have honored the Virgin or a neighbor; the archive is silent. Today the alley is barely a hundred meters long and opens into the dense fabric of Prosperidad.