Vallehermoso

Before the houses this was the low country north of Madrid: a hollow of vegetable gardens, vineyards and olive groves outside the wall of Philip IV. That terrain still names the streets. La Loma is the gentle rise that closed off the spot; la Viña recalls the vineyard that occupied it; the calle de los Olivos, the olive grove; and the avenida del Valle keeps the very word of the neighborhood. When it was built up, from 1860 on, people of every condition came, and in the twenties the Compañía Urbanizadora Metropolitana put up a colony of little villas with names of a country air: la Brisa, el Atajo, la Amapola, that red flower of the wheat fields. The other story of the neighborhood is water. Up here rose the Lozoya water that the Canal de Isabel II brought to Madrid, and the street names give account of those who conducted it: Lucio del Valle, the engineer who directed the works, and Boix y Morer, two civil engineers who signed part of the supply together. The first stretch of the avenida de Filipinas was even called Lozoya, because it ran beside the third reservoir of the Canal. Many plaques were changed here. Where there had been generals of the winning side —⁠the calle del Bosque, later an Africanist soldier⁠— today there is a poet, Ángela Figuera; where general Dávila had stood, the writer of the exile Max Aub; where Juan Vigón, the Republican orator Melquíades Álvarez. And there remains Velintonia, a Castilianization of wellingtonia, the old botanical name for the sequoia: the street was renamed after Vicente Aleixandre, the poet who lived for decades in his house there and won the Nobel. Beneath the California tree lived the man who gave his name to the street of the tree.