The names of Madrid's streets

Only in Madrid do Stock Exchange and Peace meet,
Christ and Lemon, Mirror and Amnesty.
There is Head and Beauty; there are Two Friends,
Two Sisters, the Second of May;
there is Bear and Donoso. And Moon crosses Disillusion.

Street names are born of tributes to politicians,
saints and doctors; of swords, fish and elbows;
of shouts to gaze upon the river.

The story of Madrid is read on every corner.
And it can be learned letter by letter, step by step.

About the project

UrbiNomen is an atlas of the 2295 streets of Madrid's central core, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. For each one we tell where its name comes from, what story it holds, and what it was called before.

The maps are drawn by hand, letter by letter. The site walks with you: as you go, it tells you the story of the street under your feet. It works on your phone, with no account and no tracking, and it's free.

Start however you like: search a street you know, let the map place you where you are, or wander through the neighbourhoods.

We can tell you where you are right now, but this feature is a marvel on your phone. Give it a try.

I can walk with you
street by street
in real time.

The neighbourhoods of central Madrid

The heart of the city, inside the M-30 ring.

Las Acacias

Las Acacias takes its name from the Paseo de las Acacias, and that from the acacias that shaded it when it was still a road leading out of Madrid toward the Puente de Toledo.

Adelfas

Adelfas owes its name to the Calle de las Adelfas, after the pink-flowered shrub that grows along dry riverbeds and streams. The plant’s name traveled from the Greek daphne (laurel) to the Andalusi Arabic al-diflà and from there into Spanish.

Almagro

Almagro takes its name from one of its streets, dedicated to Diego de Almagro, the conquistador who accompanied Pizarro in Peru and ended up executed after fighting over Cuzco.

Almenara

An almenara was the tower from which fire signals were made to warn of a distant danger, from battlement to battlement. The neighborhood inherited its name from an old Almenara stream and road that came down through this high area in the north of Madrid.

Arapiles

Arapiles takes its name from the Calle de Arapiles, which recalls the Battle of Los Arapiles (1812), the Anglo-Spanish victory that opened Wellington’s road to Madrid. Los Arapiles are two hills next to a village in Salamanca.

Argüelles

Argüelles bears the name of Agustín Argüelles, the Asturian liberal politician who drafted much of the Constitution of 1812 and whom the Cortes appointed tutor of the young Isabella II. The City Council gave his name to this neighborhood of the Ensanche, built on the high ground beside the Montaña del Príncipe Pío.

Atocha

Atocha comes from esparto, that tough dryland grass called at-tawcha in Arabic that covered these open lands to the south of Madrid. From that scrub arose the devotion to the Virgin of Atocha, and from her the name of the whole neighborhood.

Los Austrias

Palacio

The oldest Madrid, that of the Habsburgs: the Plaza Mayor, the Royal Palace on the site of the old Alcázar, and the Cavas that are now La Latina.

Bellas Vistas

Bellas Vistas is so called after the Pasaje de Bellas Vistas, a small alley opened on these heights of northern Madrid from which, before the houses went up, the city could be seen in the distance. The name of the passage ended up christening the entire neighborhood.

Berruguete

Berruguete bears the surname of a line of artists from Paredes de Nava, led by the sculptor Alonso Berruguete, the great figure of the Castilian Renaissance. The neighborhood grew in the old Tetuán de las Victorias, and its main street, that of Berruguete, gave its name to the whole.

Castilla

Castilla bears the name of the kingdom that shaped half of Spain. It is a young neighborhood, built from the fifties onward on what were the fields of the village of Chamartín de la Rosa, to the north of Madrid.

Castillejos

Castillejos recalls a battle. On January 1, 1860, on some hills south of Ceuta, general Prim won the combat of Los Castillejos, and for that he was made Marquis of Castillejos. From that title the neighborhood took its name.

Chopera

La Chopera is named after a chopera, a grove of black poplars that grew beside the Manzanares. Those wooded meadows were the promenade where the town went out to take the air by the river.

Chueca

Justicia

The Salesas Reales turned into the Palace of Justice, and the square of the musician Federico Chueca that is today the heart of LGBT+ Madrid.

Ciudad Jardín

Ciudad Jardín takes its name from a way of building: low houses with a garden instead of apartment blocks, an idea that arrived from England and that the old municipality of Chamartín de la Rosa raised here.

Ciudad Universitaria

Ciudad Universitaria is exactly that: the city of the university. The faculties of Madrid were moved here from 1927 onward, onto some hills in the northwest that until then were the fields of the Moncloa estate.

Conde Duque

Universidad

Around the guards' barracks of Conde Duque, today a cultural center: the Madrid of Olivares west of San Bernardo.

Las Cortes

Cortes

The Madrid of Congress and the Carrera de San Jerónimo: politicians, newspapers, and cafés between the Puerta del Sol and the Paseo del Prado.

Cuatro Caminos

Cuatro Caminos is no metaphor: four dirt roads really did cross here when this was the outskirts of Madrid. The Glorieta de Cuatro Caminos keeps the site of that crossing.

Delicias

The name comes from no factory and no train, but from a promenade. The paseo de las Delicias was so named because it was a wooded, pleasant spot for walking toward the Manzanares, planted in the days of Ferdinand VI.

Embajadores

Embajadores owes its name to an old street and field where tradition holds that some foreign ambassadors took refuge during a medieval plague, fleeing the contagion of the center.

Estrella

The name didn’t fall from the sky, even if it looks that way. It’s disputed whether it comes from the insurance company La Estrella, which owned land here, or from the Star of Bethlehem, as an extension of the neighboring Niño Jesús district. Afterward, the streets filled up with heavenly bodies.

Fuente del Berro

The berro, watercress, is that round-leaved plant that grows only in clean, running water. Where it sprouts, there’s a spring. Here there was one, and so good that the kings sent for its water to drink: the neighborhood takes its name from that fountain and that herb.

Gaztambide

Gaztambide names no old corner: it takes it from Calle de Joaquín Gaztambide, the Navarrese zarzuela composer. And the surname, in Basque, means path of the chestnut trees (gaztaina, chestnut, and bide, path).

Guindalera

La Guindalera was the orchards of sour cherry trees —⁠the tart-fruited cherries⁠— that covered this eastern outskirt before the houses. A legend runs about a “Don Guindo,” but no paper confirms it.

Hispanoamérica

Hispanoamérica is named after its own streets: nearly all of them bear the name of a Latin American country or city. Before it was developed, this was country hamlets northeast of Madrid, one of them las Cuarenta Fanegas.

Ibiza

The neighborhood is called Ibiza after its main street, and the street after the island. When the Ensanche was laid out here, these eastern streets were given names from the Balearics, and one of them ended up naming the whole neighborhood.

Imperial

The name comes from the imperial promenades that in the 18th century ran down toward the Manzanares. “Imperial” was never clear: some tie it to the road to Toledo, the “imperial city”; others, to the canal that was meant to be opened on the river.

Los Jerónimos

Jerónimos

Los Jerónimos takes its name from the Monastery of San Jerónimo el Real, the church that still rises above the quarter. It was founded by the Hieronymite friars at the end of the fifteenth century, and beside it the kings later raised the palace of the Buen Retiro.

Discover the origin
of the names along the
Camino de Santiago →