Bellas Vistas

Before the development, this was open land and paths up on the heights, on the outskirts of Madrid. Four old roads converged here —⁠hence the Glorieta de Cuatro Caminos⁠— and the leñeros, the woodmen, came down with firewood from the Dehesa de la Villa, leaving their name on a street. Crossing the neighborhood there still runs the brick gallery of the Canal de Isabel II, the Amaniel aqueduct, which gives its name to the Calle Acueducto. When Madrid began to spill over its wall, the newcomers found Tetuán far cheaper than the fashionable expansion district, and working people settled here. The Otamendi brothers, engineers from Guipúzcoa who also directed Madrid’s first metro, developed these plots in the twenties. Many streets were opened over private estates and bear the surname of the landowner: Abel, after Pedro Abel; Antonia Domínguez and María Pedraza, owners across whose land the streets were laid. Alongside them, a large group of streets bear names from Spanish geography, above all from the north: Pamplona, Olite and Beire in Navarre, Tudelilla in La Rioja, Sahagún and Zamora in León and Castile, Tenerife in the Canaries, or the Madrid village of El Molar. And since the neighborhood was born while Madrid was still absorbed in the War of Africa, the battles of that campaign appear: Castillejos, Wad-Ras, Garellano. There are a handful of streets of theatrical comedians and singers —⁠Carlos Latorre, the first Don Juan Tenorio of romanticism; Joaquín Arjona and Fernando Ossorio, actors; the Malagan soprano Lorenza Correa; the bass Francisco Salas, who revived the zarzuela⁠— and many small dedications, fitting for a working-class neighborhood, to a Rafael Herrero or a Pedro Rogel whom no one now remembers. At the corner of the Hospital de San José y Santa Adela, which the bequest of Adela Balboa built for the poor sick, the houses today cover what could once be seen: from these heights the city is no longer in view.