“Clothesline Romances” - poems with a fascinating and sensational plot - were once extremely popular. They were published in the form of folded sheets and hung out for sale in markets, attached to clotheslines with clothespins. The heroines presented in this collection of poems are fugitives, traitors, bandits, who came primarily from noble families. A new type of heroine - a fearless and cruel beauty with a sword or musket in her hands - became widespread in Spanish romances of the 17th and 18th centuries. Poems about women who violated the law served as moral teaching, but, thanks to colorful descriptions of atrocities, at the same time they appealed to the undemanding taste of the average person. In the 19th century, “clothesline romances” disappeared, unable to compete with the crime chronicles of the tabloid press.