The most famous of was seventeen, sewed for a living, and had a French father. Manuela Malasaña was born in 1791, the daughter of a baker named Jean Malesange, whose surname the Spanish turned into Malasaña, and she earned her money as an embroiderer right here in this neighbourhood.
How she died was never settled. In one version she stood on the balcony of her parents' home, carrying gunpowder to the , until she was shot. In the other, which fits the archives better, she spent the whole day inside the workshop where she worked, and on her way home she was stopped by a French patrol that searched her and found her embroidery scissors. Carrying a weapon meant summary execution, and that was that.
In the list of four hundred and nine victims drawn up in 1908 from the military and municipal archives, she appears as number seventy-four.
On the Calle de San Andrés next to us, a plaque marks the house where she lived. The neighbourhood has carried her name since the 1980s, and anyone grabbing a beer here in the evening usually does so without knowing it was named after an embroiderer.
We follow the Calle de Manuela Malasaña west, until we come out on the Calle de San Bernardo.
Sources. Story: Hispanopedia, Manuela Malasaña; Juan Pérez de Guzmán, El dos de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid, 1908; Pedro de Répide, Las calles de Madrid, 1921. Photos: Eugenio Álvarez Dumont, Malasaña y su hija, 1887, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
