Atocha

Before the houses and the tracks, this was the far south of Madrid, dry soil where esparto grew, with threshing floors and the odd poplar grove going down toward the Manzanares. The road to Valencia passed through here and the sanctuary of the Virgin of Atocha was raised. When the railway arrived in the nineteenth century, the great station changed everything: around it a neighborhood of workers took shape, railwaymen and laborers from the workshops. The old name of the place survived in the station and in the Túnel de Atocha, the branch line that links the Atocha and Chamartín stations underground. In 1941 the old Plaza de Atocha was renamed Plaza del Emperador Carlos V, after the king who in Spain was Charles I. From there two boulevards set out bearing the names of royal women: the Paseo Infanta Isabel recalls Isabel de Borbón, “la Chata,” daughter of Isabella II and a much-loved figure in the Madrid of her day. Further inland, the land had belonged to Pedro Bosch, a nineteenth-century cloth merchant and art dealer, owner of the Pacífico estates from which his street took its name. And beside him, two towns of the province: Leganés, whose name is born of mud, the légamo of an old lagoon, and Garganta de los Montes, which describes the narrowness of the terrain between mountains of the sierra. But what fills the neighborhood is a garden of names of trees and plants. The Almez, the hackberry with tiny fruits that children fired from blowpipes; the Tejo, of red wood and poisonous sap; the yellow Retama of the drylands; the Acanto, whose leaf shaped the Corinthian capital; the Alamedilla of riverbank poplars; and the Kentia, a parlor palm. From America come the violet-flowered Jacaranda, the sweet-podded Tamarindo and the Ombú —⁠from the Guaraní umbú, “shade”⁠—⁠, the solitary tree that gives shade on the pampa. Where once only esparto grew, there are now streets labeled with half the botany of the world.