Cuatro Caminos

Before it was a neighborhood, this was the outskirts: fields, threshing floors and farmhouses around a crossing of dirt roads. When Madrid grew northward, the area filled with people who came from elsewhere to work, and Cuatro Caminos became a working-class neighborhood. The trade unionist Largo Caballero lived here, and Pablo Iglesias worked at a printing shop on Bravo Murillo. That political vein left its mark on the street plan: the calle de Julián Besteiro, professor and Socialist leader who presided over the Cortes of the Republic and died a prisoner, or the Mártires de Paracuellos, the prisoners taken from the jails and shot in the autumn of 1936. The newcomers are remembered by streets bearing the names of provinces: Ávila, Cuenca, Jaén, Palencia, Teruel, Lérida, Salamanca, Orense, Oviedo… Many were Basques, and so Guipúzcoa and Hernani appear, the town that held out in the Third Carlist War. There is also a Cervantine corner —⁠Don Quijote, Dulcinea⁠— and a Galdosian one with Fortunata y Jacinta, the two women of the novel. And a group of Americans on the edge of the Castellana: the plaza de Lima, the avenida de Brasil, the calle de Montevideo, and the General Perón, the Argentine president who helped postwar Spain. Beside the calle de Edgar Neville —⁠the filmmaker who captured the Madrid of taverns and street festivals⁠— rises the Basilica of La Merced, which gives its name to the calle de la Basílica and drags behind it a whole calendar of Merceds: the calle de las Mercedes after the Virgin who freed captives, the Reina Mercedes and the Infanta Mercedes, the two Bourbon women who died young. And from those fields of threshing floors comes the humblest of all the names: the calle de los Artistas, which honors no painter, but an old wayside eatery where the laborers from the building sites stopped to rest.