Calle Anastasio Aroca

Behind this name is a schoolteacher, Anastasio Aroca, credited with creating a settlement of low-cost houses in this corner of the old Prosperidad, built so that families of scant means could have a roof of their own when the neighborhood was still an outlying district north of Madrid. Before bearing his name, the street was called calle de Erice. It keeps part of that humble fabric: a well-preserved cluster of low houses with a garden at the entrance and a yard behind, now a rarity among the apartment blocks around them. Some may date back to the turn of the twentieth century, a trace of the early village of Chamartín that the city eventually absorbed. Little survives of Aroca’s life. He is said to have written several works, though no trace of them remains in any library, so the man is harder to pin down today than the street that recalls him.