Niño Jesús

Before this was a quarter, it was the undeveloped southeast of the Retiro: dumps, embankments and railway tracks. The Arganda railway ran through here, with its terminus at this point, known to people by the saying “the Arganda train, which whistles more than it moves.” In 1877 the Duchess of Santoña, María del Carmen Hernández y Espinosa de los Monteros, founded the Hospital del Niño Jesús, the first in Spain devoted solely to children. The building stood almost alone in the middle of the fields, and its dedication went on naming what came afterward: the station, the quarter and, since 1953, the Plaza del Niño Jesús, which until then had been called Glorieta del Marqués de Perales. The development came in two stages. First, between 1925 and 1932, the Colonia del Retiro —⁠“La Regalada”⁠—⁠, some two hundred-odd single-family houses under the Cheap Housing Act, with streets named after Golden Age writers: Juan de Jáuregui, who translated Tasso’s Aminta; Avendaño, author of a single play; Arias Montano, the humanist of the Polyglot Bible; and Martín Sarmiento, the Benedictine who studied Galician, whose street borders the estate to the south. Then, from 1947, the Inmobiliaria Urbis built the rest over the railway grounds, to a plan by Domínguez Salazar and Sáinz de Vicuña. And here Urbis did what was fitting for the quarter’s name: telling the story of Christmas street by street. Portal de Belén (Bethlehem Manger), Reyes Magos (the Magi), Anunciación (Annunciation), Virgen María (Virgin Mary), Jesús Aprendiz (Jesus the Apprentice) —⁠Christ’s years working in Joseph’s workshop⁠—⁠; and the places of the Holy Land, Nazaret, Samaria, Jericó, the city of palm trees. Amid so many names from Bethlehem runs the Avenida de Nazaret, which in Hebrew comes from netzer, “the shoot.” A quarter named after a child, with streets that tell where he was born.