Travessa da Judiaria is a short lane in the historic center of Santarém whose name preserves the exact footprint of the city’s medieval Jewish quarter. In late medieval documentation, this axis appears as the Rua Nova da Judiaria (“New Street of the Jewish Quarter”), and scholarly urban-history work identifies today’s Travessa da Judiaria and the nearby Rua Maestro Luís da Silveira as the main surviving alignments of the 15th-century Jewish quarter’s internal street structure.

As a street, the Travessa is valuable precisely because it is not an abstract “memory of Jews,” it is a retained piece of the medieval urban grid. Research on Santarém’s urban evolution links this micro-topography to regulatory mechanisms typical of Portuguese towns, in which Jewish residence was concentrated and movement could be controlled through narrow passages, bounded circulation, and the management of access routes. In this reading, the Travessa reflects a lived urban environment of dense housing and constrained space, rather than a symbolic label applied later.

The street’s position also anchors it physically within the fortified city. A pedestrian itinerary for Santarém’s historic center places the descent into Travessa da Judiaria from Avenida 5 de Outubro and notes that, at its end, one can still observe to the left an old bastion of the city wall, before continuing along the side of the Igreja da Graça. This situates the Travessa on the edge between residential lanes and the defensive architecture of the upper town, a typical setting for late medieval quarters shaped by walls, gates, and internal boundaries.

In present-day administrative geography, Travessa da Judiaria lies in the parish of Marvila (Santarém) and is associated with the postal code 2000-123, with publicly listed coordinates for the street.