Chopera

Before the houses, this was the bank of the Manzanares: low meadows, poplar groves and paths that ran down to the water. The town opened tree-lined promenades here to come out and take the fresh air by the river, and from those poplars the name remained. It was the same pleasure that gave the neighboring district of Delicias its name: going down for a stroll along the shore. When the vado de Santa Catalina still served to cross the river on foot where it ran shallow, there was nothing here but riverside meadow; the bridge came later. What came afterward was work. In 1925 the Municipal Slaughterhouse opened, and around its halls a working-class neighborhood grew up. The Plaza Matadero and the Plaza del Rastro, inherited in its pavilions, recall those cattle; today those same pavilions are a cultural center, but the name still smells of the trade. The postwar years were organized by the parish: the Calle Párroco Julio Morate bears the name of the first priest of Beata María Ana de Jesús, who built up religious and community life when everything was still to be done. Nearby, the Calle Divino Vallés honors Francisco Vallés, the physician whom Philip II called “the Divine” for curing his gout, and the Plaza de Rutilio Gacis honors a Tuscan sculptor whose surname, Gaci, the street registry distorted into “Gacís” for nearly seventy years. Many of the streets look out to the sea and to the lost colonies. The Calle de Fernando Poo names the African island —⁠today Bioko, in the former Spanish Guinea⁠— after the Portuguese navigator who sighted it; the Voluntarios Macabebes were the Filipinos of Pampanga who remained loyal to Spain when the Philippines were lost and emigrated here in 1900; the Comandante Benítez died in 1921 defending Igueriben in the Rif. Among so many overseas names there also remained the Puente de Praga, so christened after the Czech capital in 1932, though Madrileños called it by something far plainer. Where the poplars once grazed beside the water, cars now cross over a river you can barely see.