Pacífico

Before the houses, this was the Olivar de Atocha and open country south of the Retiro, crossed by the old Vallecas road, Madrid’s way out toward the east. When the railway reached Atocha, the land filled with workshops, warehouses and car sheds: the calle de Cocheras recalls the two tram depots that stood here from 1879, and the calle del Comercio names, without any fuss, what was done in the area. As it was built up, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, working people came to live here, and a philanthropic society, the Constructora Benéfica —⁠which the locals called “La Caridad”⁠— put up its first low-cost houses in 1883: hence the calle de la Caridad, where two of those dwellings still stand. The street names were split between the war that gave the neighborhood its name and culture. On one side, the sailors and battles of the Pacific: the calle de Abtao, after the 1866 battle off that Chilean island; Sánchez Barcáiztegui, the captain who commanded the frigate Almansa at Callao; and general Velarde, which in 1943 replaced the old calle de la Marina Española. On the other, the men of letters: Antonio de Nebrija, who wrote the first grammar of Castilian in 1492; Téllez, the surname of Tirso de Molina; Narciso Serra, the playwright, named on the exact day of his birthday; and Gutenberg, of the printing press. And the men of the Royal Botanical Garden: the botanist Cavanilles, whose surname the locals pronounced “Cabanilles,” with a b, until the City Council set things straight in 1880. Hard by the neighborhood, the Royal Tapestry Factory left its mark in two names: the calle de Vandergoten, after the Flemish master weavers Philip V brought over in 1720, and the calle de Fuenterrabía, which skirts the factory’s neo-Mudéjar building. Where warehouses and rail platforms once stood, the Docks, today the plaza de Daoíz y Velarde and the calle de León Gil de Palacio open up, the man who made the model of Madrid of 1830. And on a recent plaque, the plazuela de la Doctora Gabriela Morreale, the chemist who brought the heel-prick test to Spain. In the neighborhood named after an ocean, the water names can be counted on one hand: the Alberche, a tributary of the Tagus, and little more.