Prosperidad

Before 1862 this was dry farmland northeast of Madrid, brown earth crossed by paths toward the villages, with the odd brickworks and roadside inn along the Hortaleza road. When Próspero Soynard began selling plots, people of little means came to live here and put up their low houses of brick and courtyard. Part of that early neighborhood was the Colonia Ibarrondo, where the very residents who built their homes earned the right to name the streets: hence the roads with names like Julio López, Martín Machío or Francisco Vivancos, of whom often nothing remains but the surname on the sign. Later came another Aroca, the schoolmaster Anastasio Aroca, who founded a colony of low-cost houses around here. Because the neighborhood grew without a plan, the street names were put up haphazardly, and many came off the map: villages of the Sierra de Madrid and Guadalajara that the street plan simply copied. There is Mataelpino, at the foot of La Maliciosa; Robregordo, named for the thick oaks of its district; Horcajuelo, of black slate architecture; Pinilla del Valle and Prádena del Rincón in the upper Lozoya; and the distant Alustante, lost at seventeen hundred meters in the old Señorío de Molina. And peaks and crags of the Guadarrama: the Pedriza, terrain of loose stone; the Peñota; the Abantos mountain above El Escorial. Beside them, a run of priests: Padre Claret, a Catalan weaver turned missionary, and his co-founder Padre Xifré, built the Claretian house here, and from that comes the calle del Corazón de María, the devotion that gives the order its name. Not everything is geography and the calendar of saints. A woman of the people, Clara del Rey, died defending the Monteleón artillery park on May 2, 1808, and has a street and a square. María Luisa Suárez Roldán, a labor lawyer and resident of the neighborhood, opened one of the first practices of her profession in the thick of the dictatorship. And there remains the trace of Cardinal Silíceo, archbishop of Toledo and tutor to the future Philip II, who was born Juan Martínez Guijarro and Latinized his surname: Silíceo, of flint, was his “Guijarro” (pebble) translated into Latin. A neighborhood named after a wish that never quite prospered, where the bricklayer and the carpenter of 1862 put up the house before the name.