Castilla

Before the cranes, this was the district of Chamartín de la Rosa, a village with its main square and its orchards that lived independent to the north of Madrid until the capital swallowed it in 1948. Traces of that old core remain in the street map: the Callejón de los Morales after the black mulberry trees, the Travesía de San Fernando after Ferdinand III of Castile, or the Plaza del Duque de Pastrana, a title Philip II created in 1572 for his favorite Ruy Gómez de Silva and whose house ended up owning half of Chamartín. Up the Cuesta del Sagrado Corazón the nuns climbed to their school from 1859, and the Avenida del Recuerdo recalls another school, that of the Jesuits, on the old estate of the dukes of Pastrana. When the real development arrived, from the fifties on, the namers drew on the catalog. There is a batch of plants: Membrillo, Níspero and Bambú, the Hiedra and the Buganvilla —⁠which bears the surname of the French navigator Bougainville⁠—⁠, the Alaterno and the Yuca. And plenty of artists for the neighborhood of the Castilian kingdom: the Cordoban sculptor Mateo Inurria, who died in a house on his own street; the painters Daniel Vázquez Díaz and José Bardasano, a Republican poster artist who appears twice, spelled correctly and incorrectly (Bardasano and Baldasano); the zarzuela composer Pablo Luna, the flamenco dancer Pastora Imperio and the poet count Agustín de Foxá, who wrote Madrid, de corte a checa. Against that backdrop the side that won the war holds sway. The Calle de los Caídos de la División Azul recalls the volunteers who went to fight alongside Nazi Germany in Russia; the general Fernández Silvestre, the favorite of Alfonso XIII, fell in the disaster of Annual; and two popes and a cardinal —⁠Pius XII, the Cardenal Spínola, Marcelo Spínola⁠— put a cassock on the street map. Amid so many names with a title, notable, or saint, two streets —⁠Levante and Poniente⁠— make do with pointing out where the sun rises and sets.