Topic summary
Eleven Thousand Virgins
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Saint Ursula.
Places named after her companions
- Christopher Columbus named the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean in her honour when sailing past them in 1493.
- Ferdinand Magellan rounded Cape Virgenes on 21 October 1520 and entered the Straits of Magellan, naming the cape after Ursula's virgins.
- In 1521 João Álvares Fagundes, a Portuguese explorer, gave the name Eleven Thousand Virgins to what is now known as Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.
- Basel, a Swiss city about 400 km south of Cologne, has a tradition of Ursula and her companions passing through Basel intending to go to Rome. The legend gave its name to the Eleven Thousand Virgins Alley (Elftausendjungfern-Gässlein), which climbs one side of the Münsterberg, a hill in the centre of the city.