3 great women that you will discover on your walk through the Ciudad Vieja

María Pita

The history of A Coruña is linked to the names of several women that stand out in the city's collective memory, legends and literature.

Some of these women have a biography closely tied to the Ciudad Vieja, where the houses where they lived keep their legacy alive among its beautiful chapels, palaces and cobbled streets.

María Pita

María Mayor Fernández de Cámara y Pita, popularly known as María Pita, was born in Sigrás (Cambre), but her story is closely linked to A Coruña.

Her legend can be traced back to the English attack in 1589, when the troops led by the admiral and former corsair Sir Francis Drake tried to storm the Ciudad Vieja, breaking through its walls, to the terror of Coruñans.

Slaying an English commander, María Pita snatched up the lance bearing the English flag and shouted, "Quen teña honra, que me siga" (in English, "Whoever has honour, follow me"), leading the defence of the city, raising the spirits of the inhabitants and prompting the enemy's retreat.

Today, you can visit the María Pita House Museum in Calle Herrerías, where you can see what her life was like and what the city would have been like at that moment in history.

Emilia Pardo Bazán

Coruña-born writer, intellectual, journalist, literary critic and storyteller, Emilia Pardo Bazán was undoubtedly one of the most prominent figures in 19th-century Spanish literature.

She wrote more than 500 artistic works, including Los Pazos de Ulloa and La Tribuna, a work in which she renamed A Coruña as "Marineda". She is also considered one of the first trailblazers of feminism in Spain.

Her family home, before it was moved to the Pazo de Meirás (which she herself commissioned to be rebuilt) was inside the Ciudad Vieja, in Calle Tabernas, where today you can visit the Emilia Pardo Bazán House Museum which pays homage to her life. The same house is also the current headquarters of the Royal Galician Academy.

Rosalía de Castro

If there is one quintessential writer in the Galician language, it's Rosalía de Castro. She spent part of her life in A Coruña. Her husband, Manuel Murguía, was born in A Coruña. He was a writer as well, and he went on to found the Royal Galician Academy years after Rosalía's death.

Rosalía de Castro was a great poet and novelist, the author of the first great work of contemporary Galician literature, Cantares Gallegos, a precursor of modern Spanish poetry.

She lived at 3 Calle Príncipe between 1871 and 1874, where she was a neighbour of Emilia Pardo Bazán, but her mark on the city reached far beyond there. She wrote one of the two poems commemorated on plaques in the San Carlos Garden, a poem she dedicated to the British army general Sir John Moore.

A plaque on the Rosalía de Castro House reminds passers-by that the writer lived there. The building is still preserved but cannot be visited.