Arapiles

Before the houses, this is where Madrid’s dead lay. For much of the nineteenth century the eastern sector of what is now Arapiles was occupied by the northern cemeteries, the Cementerio General among them, laid out by Juan de Villanueva, the same man who designed the Prado Museum. When the Almudena opened in 1884, these graveyards were closed and stood abandoned for years, with tombs half in ruin. Only afterward, well into the twentieth century, were the remains moved and could the city grow above them. Middle-class people then arrived, in tightly packed blocks of the expansion district pressed against Vallehermoso and Gaztambide. The neighborhood’s name comes from its battle, and many streets stay in that vein of arms and glorious defeats. Arapiles, of course, and the Glorieta del Gran Capitán, after Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Cordoban soldier who reformed the armies of the Renaissance. Beside him the discoverers hold sway: Magallanes, the Portuguese in the service of Castile whose expedition made the first voyage around the world. And a curious mariner, Blasco de Garay, a sixteenth-century engineer who moved a ship with paddle wheels before Charles I in Barcelona; centuries later a legend credited him with the first steamboat, though the paddles were driven by fifty men by force of arm. Other streets look to the water from the mountains that gave Madrid its drink: the Lozoya, the river that the Canal de Isabel II brought to the capital, and Cercedilla, the village in the Guadarrama, in a corner where several streets bear the names of Madrid localities. And there are the writers who chronicled this city: Julio Nombela, a friend of Bécquer; Emilio Carrere, the late poet of bohemia; Patricio de la Escosura, romantic and politician. The Calle de Fernández de los Ríos recalls the urban planner who dreamed of a great tree-lined avenue around here. Over that field of cemeteries, the water from the mountains now runs only in the names on the corners.