Hispanoamérica

Before the blocks, this was countryside: market gardens and modest hamlets northeast of Madrid, in the district of Chamartín de la Rosa, next to friars' land. One of those settlements was called las Cuarenta Fanegas, after the measure of its ground. The city arrived late, mainly from the 1970s on, and in laying out the streets they were named by theme: the countries and cities of Latin America. So there’s Calle de Chile, Calle de Colombia, Calle de Nicaragua, Calle de Puerto Rico; Paseo de La Habana after the Cuban capital, Plaza de Lima and Plaza de Valparaíso after the Chilean port. Some hold their own history: Potosí, the silver mountain that sustained the empire; Veracruz, the port Cortés founded in 1519; Cochabamba, which in Quechua names a plain of lagoons. But before the republics arrived there was another, humbler development. The Unión Eléctrica Madrileña company built a settlement of little houses here for its employees and, instead of naming the streets, numbered them New York style: from Primera to Undécima. Nearly all were renamed later, but a few are still known by the number they were dealt on the map —⁠Cuarta, Sexta, Octava, Novena⁠—⁠, like a figure no one ever changed. And in a corner to the north the theme shifts again and a garden appears: Avenida de los Alhelíes, the streets of the Calas, the Narcisos, the Lirios, the Acebo, the Sauce. Some of those flower names aren’t innocent: Paseo de los Jacintos and its neighbors replaced, after the Civil War, the names of socialist figures that had marked that working-class settlement. Among so many American countries, home slips in too. Plaza de Maslama al-Mayriti recalls the astronomer of Muslim Madrid, the first great scholar born in the town; Calle del Padre Damián, the Belgian missionary who stayed to die caring for lepers on Molokai. To the southwest looms the Santiago Bernabéu stadium. And Plaza de José María Soler, which honors the deputy mayor who remodeled the Plaza Mayor, once bore another name: Plaza de las Peonías, after the flower that still grows wild in the nearby hills.