Plazuela de las Comendadoras

In the Universidad quarter, the plazuela de las Comendadoras wraps the north flank of a great convent block. The present name came late: earlier it was plaza de San Juan la Nueva, plazuela del Limón, and even plazuela del Papel Pintado, after a Royal Factory that two French brothers set up here in 1788 and that Casimiro Mahou tore down in 1889 to build his brewery, today the ABC Museum. The name that prevailed comes from the convent that dominates the square, the only one Madrid keeps intact. Founded by will in 1584, it received no community until 1651, when several comendadoras of the Order of Santiago arrived from Valladolid with Philip IV as patron. It holds an altarpiece Luca Giordano painted in 1695 showing Santiago charging into the Battle of Clavijo. In the Civil War militias used it as a detention center and the Franco regime turned it into a prison for Republican inmates, more than three thousand crammed inside. The nuns recovered it in 1941; the church reopened around 2024 after a quarter century closed.

The poet José Hierro, aged eighteen, was transferred on 11 March 1940 to the convent turned prison. There he was joined by the composer Eduardo Rincón and the brothers Felipe and Víctor Sánchez Sierra. In October 1940 Hierro was sentenced to twelve years and one day in prison for belonging to a clandestine network that helped Republican prisoners. Years later he described the conditions of the confinement: more than three thousand men crammed into the convent’s premises. He left prison in January 1944 and in 2000 received the Cervantes Prize. The same church that held the prisoners preserves at its east end the altarpiece by Luca Giordano that the nuns had commissioned two and a half centuries earlier.