As we have seen, elite women, who risked their reputation if they appeared in public without proper modesty and accompaniment, utilized various strategies to distance themselves from public space even as they moved through it such as veiling or using coaches to travel the streets in a private space from which they could observe city life yet elide their identity behind curtains or veils. Unlike veiling, coaches were expensive and required a coachman and horses, and thus allowed women to display elite social status to onlookers while remaining physically inaccessible. Nonetheless, the use of coaches as a marker of modesty drew the same sort of moral outrage and social satire that women's veiling practices did. On the other hand, the private space that allowed elite women to forgo the city streets proved an ideal site for courtship and seduction given its privacy from prying eyes and could be used by elite men to transport paid sexual companions discreetly. A series of legislative measures endeavoured to control and restrict the use of coaches, but these were largely ineffective. For these reasons, the coach became a battleground in the debate over female comportment. In this chapter, I analyse the use of coaches by several pícaras as a site from which to enact sexual trickery. These representations reflect the cultural anxiety over the potential for sexually licentious behaviour afforded by the semi-private space of the coach's interior that manifests itself through depictions of the pícara as a sexualized predator, yet at the same time they demonstrate important differences in authorial attitude toward sexual transgression.

Coaches, introduced around the 1550s most likely by the court of Charles V, came into vogue in the sixteenth century, and at first were used primarily by women. After the court was definitively established in Madrid in 1606, coaches became one of the defining characteristics of courtly culture in the city, and by 1640 over 1000 travelled the streets. At first, ladies of the court used coaches to protect their honour in public by removing themselves from public space, both physically and visually; by closing the curtains they could even evade the male gaze, allowing the occupant to remain completely invisible.