Former Convent of Santa Clara

In front of you is the former convent of the Poor Clares, completed around 1621. For more than two centuries it was the closed world of cloistered nuns. After it was shut down in the 19th century it became a prison and then a charity hospital, and since 1994 it has been a hotel.

1October 1949

On 26 October 1949 a young reporter from El Universal, Gabriel García Márquez, came to cover the emptying of the convent's crypts. As he himself told it in the preface to «Of Love and Other Demons» (1994), when one of the niches of the high altar was opened, a mane of copper-coloured hair twenty-two metres and eleven centimetres long spilled out, still attached to a young girl's skull. Only a name could be read on the tombstone: Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles.

García Márquez then remembered a legend his grandmother used to tell him: a twelve-year-old little marquise, dead of rabies, whose hair trailed behind her like a bridal train. The novel was born from that.

We know the 1949 scene from the author's own account. The girl Sierva María is a literary character.

2A legend born from a book

The old crypt is preserved inside the hotel and has become a place of literary pilgrimage. The novel also brought a new legend: some people say they feel the presence there of the girl with the copper hair. It is modern folklore, born from fiction.

3What to look for

• The massive, almost windowless walls, typical of an enclosed convent.
• Calle del Torno, named after the revolving hatch through which the nuns received things from outside.
• The attached church, with its simple bell gable.