Convento de las Trinitarias: The Grave Found in 2015
Why is it significant?
Walk along the long, blind brick wall of the convent and stop at the church door. Behind these walls live enclosed nuns, as they have for four centuries, and somewhere beneath their church lie the bones of the man who wrote Don Quixote. Why here? Because of a debt.
Key Facts
| Place | Convento de las Trinitarias: The Grave Found in 2015 |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Lope de Vega 18, 28014 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41350, -3.69760 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Barrio de las Letras: Cervantes, Lope de Vega & the Writers' Quarter |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the long, blind brick wall of the convent and stop at the church door. Behind these walls live enclosed nuns, as they have for four centuries, and somewhere beneath their church lie the bones of the man who wrote Don Quixote.
Why here? Because of a debt. In 1575, returning from war, the young soldier Cervantes was captured by pirates and taken to Algiers. He spent five years as a captive and tried to escape four times. In 1580 he was finally ransomed by friars of the Trinitarian order, whose mission was exactly that: buying back Christian prisoners. When he died, he asked to be buried by the Trinitarian nuns. It was a thank-you, thirty-six years late.
But his grave was lost almost at once. The convent church was rebuilt later in the seventeenth century, the remains of those buried in the old one were moved, and for nearly four hundred years nobody knew where Cervantes lay. Then, in 2014, a team of historians and forensic scientists searched the crypt with ground-penetrating radar. In March 2015 they announced that among a jumble of bones in a crypt, mixed with those of others, were fragments that very probably belonged to Cervantes. Not certain... probable. A new tomb monument was unveiled that same year.
And here is the twist that delights Madrileños: this street, where Cervantes rests, is named Calle de Lope de Vega, after his rival. Even stranger, Lope's own daughter, Marcela, became a nun in this very convent and spent her life here writing poetry. Just around the corner, a little street carries the name of Francisco de Quevedo, who, the story goes, bought the house where his enemy Góngora lived, just to throw him out.
Literary Madrid was small, vicious and wonderful. Now follow the narrow streets downhill, south to the busy Calle de Atocha, and turn left. At number 87, behind an ordinary facade, the most famous novel in the Spanish language first went to press.