Catholic footprint in the streets of Habaneras: Calle Amargura

Calle amarguraAccording to tradition, this street took its name from the Via Crucis that members of the Franciscan order celebrated in it, to the Hermitage of the Humilladero – later parish of the Christ of the Good Journey – from the middle of the seventeenth century and which had its stations in different blocks of the road. This pious practice still takes place on the afternoon of Good Friday, albeit with some changes in its trajectory.
It was also called “of the Green Cross”, because on the corner of Mercaderes street was placed one to mark the corresponding station, which still remains in place, when the others have already disappeared from the street.
In addition, they became known as “of the Piadosas Mujeres”, the blocks located between Villegas and Compostela streets, according to some by some sisters, Josefa and Petrona Urrutia, who used to illuminate on Fridays a Christ that they had on the facade, but others ensure, perhaps more accurately, that the appellant derived from the location, near Compostela street, of the station of the Via Crucis in which some pious women cry for Jesus.
In Aguiar and Amargura was the former Convent of St. Augustine, which then passed to the Spanish State, when religious congregations were exclaused. In a wing of him, he opened Bishop Espada in 1812 a School of Drawing, run by the painter Vermay who was the antecedent of the Academy Of St. Alexander. Decades later, the State reserved a part of the convent where the Academy of Physical and Natural Sciences was built, and the temple on the corner of Amargura, with the rest of the convent were restored and occupied by the Franciscans. The church, placed under the advocation of San Francisco, is one of the wide and most striking in that part of the city and features mural paintings by the Spaniard Martínez Andrés. Ω

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