Estrella

Before the houses, this was the eastern edge of Madrid: market gardens, tile kilns, and the Abroñigal stream, which ran along what is now the M-30. To the north stood the almshouse of the Blessed María Ana, and Calle de Vaquerías recalls the dairy stables whose cattle grazed beside it. In the early 1950s Urbis bought the land, and in 1953 the neighborhood appears for the first time under the name Estrella. Calle del Alcalde Sáinz de Baranda —⁠after Pedro Sáinz de Baranda, held to be Madrid’s first modern mayor⁠— was earlier called Calle del Límite, because that was where the city ended. Once the name was fixed, the map turned into a star chart. There are zodiac constellations such as Leo and Piscis; the Can Mayor and the Can Menor, the two dogs that follow Orion; Perseo, the Greek hero; and figures from the southern sky that can’t be seen from Madrid —⁠the Cruz del Sur, the Pez Austral, the Pez Volador, the Dorado, the Carena (the keel of the old ship Argo). And scattered stars: Sirio, the brightest in the night, and the Estrella Polar, which marks the north. Not every street looks upward. In one corner, Calle de la Moneda and Calle Valores recall the settlement that the National Mint built for its workers, named after the coinage. And the slope down to the M-30 ends in the only sign that came neither from an atlas nor from a printing press: the Puente del Corazón Partío, which Madrid named in 2020 after Alejandro Sanz and his song. Beneath a whole neighborhood of stars, the name people repeat is that of a heartbreak.