Delicias

Before the tracks, this was orchards and open country on the way to the river, with that poplar grove that gave it its name. The railroad changed everything. In 1880 the estación de Delicias opened, from which the trains left for the south; that is why a nearby street is called Ciudad Real, which was the main destination of that line. Workshops, factories and people who lived off them arrived, and beside the station the architect Francisco Alonso Martos raised a colony of cheap houses for the railway workers, which the calle de Alonso Martos recalls today. From that neighborhood also comes the calle del Cristo del Camino, a crucified Christ whom people here called the Christ of the Railwaymen. There is a corner of the neighborhood that looks like a geology sampler. They call it the barrio de los Metales, and the plaques go on reading Cobre, Plomo, Granito, and then finer stones: Alabastro, that white, almost transparent stone of the altarpieces; Berilo, from which emerald and aquamarine come; Turmalina, Circón and Circonita, all the way to Caolín, the white clay of porcelain. Where the calle del Plomo used to be, one now reads Isidoro Álvarez Álvarez, president of El Corte Inglés for twenty-five years, because the company placed its first offices here. And where it once read Batalla de Belchite, it now reads Juana Doña, the Communist leader whom Francoism sentenced to death in 1947. Beside the Planetarium the names look to the sky. There are the Nebulosas, the clouds where stars are born, and streets bearing the name of a lone star: Naos, the brightest of the ancient ship Argo; Denébola, the lion’s tail; Shaula, the scorpion’s sting. To one side, a handful of painters —⁠Luis Paret, Alejandro Ferrant, Watteau⁠— and, still, the paseo de las Delicias, without a single tree left of that grove that started it all.