SDC-ENP / José Clemente Orozco Gallery

The historic site at San Ildefonso No 30 was long part of the Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena begun in 1619. The ENP, in fact, today makes much more of that old convent open and visible to the public. The property was originally donated by Dominican nuns known as Las Felipas. They gave it to the Sienese sisters who were able to officially open their new convent in 1623. It then survived as a convent for more than 200 years. The former convent's most famous occupant was actually forced to stay here. The famed Queretaro insurgent, Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, was imprisoned here for three years during the War for Independence. She had successfully warned the priest Miguel Hidalgo of the discovery of the insurgent conspiracy. This likely saved Hidalgo's life and instigated the first insurgent uprisings in 1810. Ortiz de Domínguez died in 1829 almost around the corner from the site of the convent, in a house at #5 Calle del Carmen. By 1858, in the wake of the Reform War, a military college was briefly installed in the newly abandoned convent. The military medical corps put the building to use as a hospital in 1863, and later simply housed soldiers here. The immense complex was slowly broken down and much of it sold off to independent buyers. Some 100 years later, the ENP had established Preparatory No. 2. The building served as one of the UNAM's high schools from 1952 to 1978. The ENP later developed an academic cultural area within the complex. Today, that old indistinct area survives as the Secretariat of Cultural Diffusion that works across all nine of the ENP high schools.