Ciudad Jardín

Before the houses, this was high open country: pine woods, pasturelands and groves that climbed toward the Pinar de Chamartín, a place name that still holds out a little farther north. The calle Pinarillo, a diminutive of pinar (pine wood), recalls those trees; the calle Campanillas and the calle Reventón, plant names, follow a botanical street plan devised for the garden neighborhood. The calle de Pradillo bears the surname of the owner whose lands served to stretch the neighboring district of Prosperidad toward these heights. There is a part of the neighborhood that went entirely to the mountains. The streets are lettered with the peaks of the Guadarrama: Siete Picos, the massif of seven aligned prominences; Guaramillos, after the Alto de las Guarramillas that Madrileños call the Bola del Mundo for its antennas; La Flecha, Cueva Valiente, the Pico del Águila, the Risco del Pájaro of La Pedriza. Others name the passes through which the range is crossed toward Segovia, Cotos and Malagosto, or villages of the Sierra Norte such as Navalafuente and Redrueña —⁠the village of Redueña, whose stone carved the fountains of Cibeles and Apolo on the Paseo del Prado⁠—⁠. And where there was once a Francoist name, there is now a serene image: the plaza de la Charca Verde replaced the former Plaza de Arriba España in 2017. The rest is theater and trades. Here are María Guerrero and her husband Fernando Díaz de Mendoza, the couple who ran the most celebrated theater company of their time; Matilde Díez and José García Luna, actors of the nineteenth century and of Romanticism; Agustín de Rojas, comedian and corsair of the Golden Age. There are physicians by the handful —⁠Martín Martínez, Pérez Herrera, the Doctor Marco Corera⁠— and, presiding over it all, the avenida de Ramón y Cajal, the Aragonese who saw that the brain was made of separate neurons. On the calle de Saturnino Calleja, the publisher who flooded Spain with cheap children’s tales, even the street sign tells a tale: from him comes the saying “to have more of a tall tale than Calleja.”