Plazuela de las Comendadoras

Conde Duque·Universidad

The little square takes its name from the Royal Convent of the Comendadoras of Santiago, whose main façade fills the north side. The convent was founded in 1584 by the will of Íñigo de Cárdenas Zapata, president of the Royal Council of Military Orders, and refounded in 1651 when Philip IV brought the first professed nuns of the Order of Santiago from Valladolid. The square predated the convent under other names and took the current one as the building was completed through the last third of the 17th century.

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.

Its names

  • Plaza de San Juan la Nueva16th-17th centuries
  • Plazuela del Limón17th-18th centuries
  • Plazuela del Papel Pintado1788-c. 1856
  • Plazuela de las Comendadoras17th century (en uso desde c. 1697) hasta hoy
Sources (10)

Crossings