Fuente del Berro

For centuries this was hillside and market garden above the Abroñigal stream, the channel now buried beneath the M-30. Irrigated vineyard country, remote and poorly connected, where in the mid-19th century Pascual Madoz tried to set up the Quinta del Espíritu Santo and the venture failed to take. Things changed in the first third of the 20th century, when the Navarrese Gregorio Iturbe, under the cheap-housing laws, built two settlements of small houses with gardens for tradespeople and civil servants, the Colonias Iturbe, meant to be modest even if they ended up prized. From those years comes the leafy, quiet air of the upper streets. Iturbe, who was from Ituren, brought his homeland into the street signs. There’s a handful of northern mountains and districts: the Sierra de Aralar, between Navarre and Guipúzcoa; the Aizgorri massif —⁠from haitz, crag, and gorri, red⁠—⁠; Begoña, the old parish of Bilbao with its basilica; and Lanuza, after Juan de Lanuza, the last Justice of Aragon whom Philip II had beheaded for defending the region’s charters. Nearby, another layer of names recalls the landowners: Paseo del Marqués de Zafra, the Vizconde de Matamala, Diego and Concepción Bahamonde, all of a single lineage that held plots here and left them sown with its surname. The rest of the street map is almost a roll call of trades. Doctors: Doctor Olóriz, who devised a fingerprinting method, and Doctor Esquerdo, who freed the mentally ill from their chains. Painters: the ceramist Daniel Zuloaga, Pintor Domínguez, and the Frenchman León Bonnat, who trained in Madrid. Musicians: the Maestro Alonso of the zarzuelas, and Gabriel Abreu, blind, who devised a raised musical notation. And two odd streets: Antonio Toledano, a dealer who bought old cemetery gravestones, polished them, and sold them as marble tabletops; and Mercedes Fórmica, the lawyer who reformed the Civil Code in favor of married women, placed in 2017 where a Franco-era minister had been before. Above all the names, the watercress water that started it all still runs underground.