with the distinctively curved, fish-shaped handle left exposed to ease removal. An exception to the predominance of large-bladed sevillanas was the salvavirgo ("chastity knife"), a small knife carried by Andalusian women in a bodice or leg garter as a weapon of self-defense. By 1903 the navaja had become a weapon of stealth, always concealed and "never worn or used ostentatiously." With the advent of mass-produced, low-priced handguns and an increasingly effective national police force, the Guardia Civil, the lock-blade navaja had become the weapon of choice of the lawless and the disreputable. While most of Spain at that time was about as safe as Victorian London, travel alone after dark was never advisable given occasional encounters with brigands and thieves. The ominous click-clack of a navaja de muelles was a sound dreaded by lone travellers attempting to negotiate lonely rural highways or the Byzantine back streets of medieval Spanish cities after dark. The knife's popularity among lawless elements in Spain is attested to in James Loriega's book Sevillian Steel. Loriega writes, Navajas crossed the hands and drew the blood of soldiers and sailors, rogues and ruffians, and diplomats and aristocrats both in and out of Spain's borders. The use of the navaja fostered a mystique, not only from Seville's back streets, but also from the seedy waterfronts of Barcelona, and the cosmopolitan promenades of Madrid. Regardless of their original intent, the navaja represented the ultimate means for resolving disagreements, misunderstandings, and problems that arose in dockside bars, darkened alleys, and an untold number of places not found in any guidebook; places where there is little reliance on legal recourses; places where you either catch a glimpse of steel and live - or miss it, and never know why you died. After more than two centuries of popular and continuous use, demand for the navaja as a large fighting or utility knife began to ebb in the early 20th century. Reduced in size and length (navaja corta), the design still enjoys some popularity as a pocketknife and utility blade, and both mass-produced and individually hand-built knives of varying craftsmanship and material quality continue to be sold in Spain, primarily to tourists, collectors, and edged weapon enthusiasts. The decline in popularity of the large fighting navaja sevillana may have been accelerated by the passage of stringent laws in Spain and in the rest of the European Union proscribing the possession and/or carrying