Avenida de Bonn
An avenue in the Parque de las Avenidas (Guindalera) named after Bonn, the provisional capital of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1949 and 1990. It belongs to a set of streets in the development named after cities beginning with B, a typological criterion chosen by architects Francisco Echenique Gómez and Luis Calvo Huedo.
Anyone walking through the Parque de las Avenidas today is treading on former market gardens. Until the mid-twentieth century, this corner of the Guindalera was farmland between the Abroñigal stream and the old Barajas Motorway.
The neighborhood was born from an after-dinner reunion of former classmates. In June 1956, a board of former Areneros pupils gave rise to the property company CIOHSA, which that summer obtained permission to transform the area. And here appears the game that gives the neighborhood its character: almost every street bears the name of a city starting with B. Berlín, Bolonia, Berna, Burdeos, Brescia, Brasilia, Baviera and Bonn. No one left a record of why that initial was chosen.
The rule of the B has one famous crack. The Plaza de Venecia breaks the series, and neighbors tell that the reason was a spelling mistake: someone meant to write “Benecia” and the spelling corrected itself.