Las Acacias

This was pasture and market garden on the banks of the Manzanares, land of grazing and melon fields that supplied Madrid. Then came the smoke. In the mid-19th century the Gas Works were built here, which the locals called El Gasómetro after its great tanks, and beside the river worked the plaster factories of Paseo de Yeserías and the tanneries of the Ribera de Curtidores, where the hides the slaughterhouse left behind were treated. Calle de las Cigarreras recalls the women who rolled tobacco in the Royal Factory in nearby Embajadores, and Calle de Las Naves, the industrial sheds of this whole factory belt. The ground shows through in the older names: Peñuelas comes from peñuela, a diminutive of peña, the rocky knolls that were here. Since the neighborhood is named after a tree, more were added. There’s a district of plants and woods: the Laurel, after a leafy one that grew in a garden; the Majuelo, which is the hawthorn; the Nogales, the Caoba, the Ceiba, and the Palo de Rosa, these last three tropical cabinetmaking woods. And another group of towns from Cáceres and the province: Baños de Montemayor, of thermal waters; Pozuelo de Zarzón; Arbancón; or Soria and Valdelaguna, the Madrid town of the little lagoon in its valley. Among so many trades and trees, letters slip in: the Moratines, neoclassical father and son; Ercilla, the soldier-poet of La Araucana; Carmen Cobeña, the first actress to premiere Galdós; and Plaza de Ortega y Munilla, editor of El Imparcial and father of the philosopher. Paseo de la Esperanza promises nothing: it was named after a country estate, the one called La Esperanza, which had already vanished when all that remained here was factory smoke.