Berruguete

Before it had streets, this was the heights of northern Madrid, land of Chamartín de la Rosa and the outskirts of the old Tetuán de las Victorias, which had been born beside the road to France with houses hastily raised by humble people. Workers and day laborers came to live here, and the layout turned out as it turned out: narrow alleys, crooked blocks, names given without a plan. That is why bare first names abound —⁠Dolores, María Luisa, Porfirio, Martínez⁠— of which no one any longer knows whom they honored. Carmen Portones and Luis Portones recall owners of those lands; Fulgencio de Miguel, a councilman of Chamberí nicknamed “el de los chisperos.” When Tetuán was incorporated into Madrid, duplicated streets had to be renamed, and whole catalogs were drawn on. There is a series of Castilian and regional towns: Burgos, old capital of Castile; Cenicientos and Camporreal of the sierra and the Madrid valleys; Bustillo del Oro, from Zamora. There are islands: Isla de Córcega, Isla de La Gomera, the remote Islas Gilbert of the Pacific. And there is, above all, a herbarium: the Cactus, the Chumbera, the Zinias, the Gladiolo, the Nenúfar —⁠a word that traveled from Sanskrit to Arabic⁠—⁠, the Hierbabuena, the Saúco, the Nogal. Streets that changed one name for another: the Araucaria was Serrano; the Naranjo replaced in 1948 that of a sailor from the War of Africa. That war left its mark on the two side streets and the Calle del Serrallo, the fortified position at the gates of Ceuta that the army took in 1859, and on Tablada, which was previously called Prim. Amid so many anonymous names a few figures appear: the Golden Age writer María de Zayas, the actress Rita Luna and the comedian Mariano Fernández, the oboist Luis Misón who invented the tonadilla, and Ricardo Bellver, who carved the Fallen Angel of the Retiro. In a square of the neighborhood Rocío Dúrcal grew up, the girl from Tetuán who ended up the queen of the rancheras.