Travesía de las Beatas

Travesía de las Beatas, a short dead-end lane in the Universidad neighborhood, bears the name of women who never saw how their memory would end. Today it runs into calle de Antonio Grilo, not the calle de las Beatas that once gave it its name. The beatas were Dominican tertiaries, religious women without strict enclosure. They settled here in 1574, and Texeira recorded them in his 1656 map. Pedro de Répide remembered them as modest women who walked their white headdresses through markets and noble houses begging alms. In 1611 the Premonstratensians arrived and took over their plot; the beatas had to move to Lavapiés, where they fixed the place name Santa Catalina. Its oldest name, Aunque os pese, came from a land dispute among three gentlemen quarreling over a mill. In 1821 the council erased that name it deemed unseemly and turned it into Travesía de las Beatas. In 1899 the main street was renamed Antonio Grilo, and from then on the travesía remained a scrap of the street map that outlived its own reference.