Pasaje Montesa
The Pasaje Montesa is named after the Order of Santa María de Montesa, a monastic-military institution founded in 1317 by a bull of Pope John XXII at the request of James II of Aragon. It is a dead-end alley of about 69 metres branching off Calle de Montesa, in Madrid’s eastern Ensanche (Lista neighbourhood, Salamanca district).
When Madrid grew eastward under the expansion plan approved in 1860, its developers filled the new street map with provinces, nineteenth-century figures and military orders. One of them gave its name to Calle de Montesa, between Alcalá and Francisco Silvela, in the Lista neighbourhood. Off that street runs the Pasaje Montesa, a blind branch of barely 69 metres that leads nowhere but its own far end.
The order behind the name was born from a bull signed by Pope John XXII in 1317, at the request of James II of Aragon, who sought to give the Kingdom of Valencia its own military order after the Templars were dissolved in 1312. The new Order of Santa María de Montesa inherited the estates the Templars and Hospitallers held in that kingdom, and the Crown handed over the castle of Montesa for its convent-fortress. Of that castle, in the heart of the Salamanca district, there remains today a dead-end alley of under seventy metres that still repeats its name.