Calle Alamedilla

The name fits into a single country word: alamedilla, the diminutive of alameda, land planted with poplars. The poplar is a riverbank tree, with trembling leaves silvered underneath, that grows wherever water is near. And water, at this southern edge of Madrid, was plentiful. The street belongs to the Atocha neighbourhood, in Arganzuela, the district that slopes down toward the Manzanares. Before the city paved it over, the land between the town and the river was meadows, orchards and groves that drew on the damp of the floodplain. An alamedilla would have been one of those smaller patches of poplars, too modest to be called a full alameda but enough to fix a place name. There is no record of which grove it refers to or when the street was laid out, short as it is, barely a hundred and seventy-five metres, just enough for a row of trees that are no longer there.