Palos de la Frontera

Before it was a neighborhood, this was the southern edge of the town, land of vegetable gardens and paths toward the Manzanares. The people of the eighteenth century would go down to stroll along the river by what they called “las delicias,” and from that came the calle de las Delicias and the Glorieta de Santa María de la Cabeza, after a hermitage dedicated to the wife of San Isidro, the peasant patroness of Madrid. When the train came, the railway stitched the neighborhood together: along the line of the calle del Ferrocarril ran, for more than a century, the tracks that joined the Norte and Atocha stations. As the Ensanche de Delicias was built up, around 1880, many streets were named after Spanish provinces and cities, laid out before the houses arrived: Murcia, Vizcaya, Canarias, Tarragona, Tortosa —⁠the old Roman Dertosa beside the Ebro. And as the neighborhood’s name demands, there are a handful of seafaring streets despite being far from the sea: the calle del Áncora, after the anchor that holds ships fast, and names of those who sailed from those Andalusian ports. Sebastián Elcano, who closed the first voyage around the world in 1522. Not Pedro de Valdivia, but naval officers like Bustamante, an inventor of torpedoes who died in Cuba, whose street was called Puerto Rico until the colonies were lost in 1898. That same date, 1898, marks the neighborhood: Vara del Rey, the general killed defending El Caney in Cuba, and Bustamante himself. Around here are also the liberals of the nineteenth century —⁠Rafael de Riego, who forced Ferdinand VII to swear to the Constitution and ended up dragged to the gallows in a wicker basket; General Lacy, shot for the same cause; and Juan Martín El Empecinado, the guerrilla who harried Napoleon and was also hanged⁠— alongside Madrid painters of the Baroque like Alonso del Barco and Sebastián Herrera. So many streets celebrating the ships that set out from Palos, and the port that gave them their name took a century to be spelled right here.