Nueva España

Before the houses, this was the countryside of Chamartín de la Rosa, the village that stretched north of Madrid with its orchards, its olive groves and its dirt roads. The route toward the hamlet of Maudes ran through here, and from that trace of soft earth came the name of the Calle Arenal de Maudes. On these grounds there was also an estate belonging to the French financier Louis Guilhou, recalled today in the Calle de María Guilhou, his daughter and last owner. When it was developed, already in the fifties and sixties, well-to-do people came to live in a quiet, residential area, with embassies among the villas. The name of the viceroyalty shaped the street map. There is a whole block of American republics: Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, the squares of Perú and of the República Dominicana, Paraguay, and devotional names brought from over there, such as Nuestra Señora de Luján, patron of Argentina. And the men who built the bridge: Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan who documented Mexico’s culture in Nahuatl; the Torpedero Tucumán, the Argentine ship that carried a thousand refugees from the war away by sea; the Plaza del Presidente Cárdenas, the Mexican who took in the Republican exiles. Alongside them, the countries of the Hispanic orbit on the other ocean: Filipinas, Spanish territory until 1898. The other thread is botanical, as if the countryside that once was here would not quite give up: the Calle de las Encinas (Holm Oaks), the Cipreses (Cypresses), the Abedul (Birch), the Palmito (Palmetto); flowers such as the Lilas (Lilacs), the Hortensias (Hydrangeas), the Campánulas (Bellflowers), the Azulinas (Cornflowers), the Madreselva (Honeysuckle), and rare plants such as the Drácena (Dracaena) or the Saxífraga (Saxifrage), whose Latin name means “stone-breaker.” On the Calle de Menéndez Pidal, the philologist built himself a house around 1922, when this was still the Cuesta del Zarzal, a path on the outskirts surrounded by olive trees, and he lived in it until he died. The viceroyalty spanned the whole world; here it fits into a few streets of villas, among holm oaks that recall the countryside that came before them.