Guindalera

Until the last third of the 19th century this was market garden, tile kilns, and potteries east of Madrid, with country roads leading to the neighboring towns: Calle de Coslada follows the old Camino de Canillas, Madrid’s access to the vanished municipality of Canillas. When it began to be plotted out, around 1874, humble folk arrived and many from elsewhere. The Aragonese were so numerous that they built Madrid’s first church of El Pilar, inaugurated on a 12th of October, hence Calle de Pilar de Zaragoza. The postal workers set up their cooperative and built their little houses, the Colonia de los Carteros: they named it Grupo Thebussiano after Doctor Thebussen, the pen name of Mariano Pardo de Figueroa —⁠an anagram of “embustes,” fibs, with an added h⁠—⁠, and they wanted to name its two inner streets Máxima Bondad and Máxima Belleza; they lost the adjective and were left with Bondad and Belleza. Much of the neighborhood was built by private developers who named the streets as they pleased. Mariano Santos Pinela and the architect Julián Marín built the Madrid Moderno settlement from 1890, with streets named after European cities: Londres, Roma, Bremen. The avenue that closed off that settlement bore Marín’s name until 1931; his wife’s survives in the cross street Rafaela Bonilla. Marín also gave his name to the avenue until, in 1931, the year of the first bullfight at Las Ventas —⁠whose northern flank it borders⁠—⁠, it became Avenida de los Toreros, in honor of the whole trade rather than a single matador. Many a sign is nothing more than the surname of the plot’s owner: Otero, Oltra, Ruiz Ocaña, Francisco Altimiras, who in 1855 applied for a license to build beside the Venta del Espíritu Santo. From that 19th-century literary bent remain the playwrights of the género chico and the zarzuela: Ricardo de la Vega, author of La verbena de la Paloma; Salvador Granes, the “king of parody”; José Picón, who wrote Pan y toros. And, well into the 20th century, the painters of bullfighting: Roberto Domingo and Pintor Moreno Carbonero, teacher of Picasso and Juan Gris. On the other side, in the Parque de las Avenidas that CIOHSA developed from 1956 over the old market gardens, the architects invented a game and named every street after a city beginning with B: Berlín, Berna, Bolonia, Brescia, Burdeos. Of the cherry trees that gave the name, not one is left.