Calle Antonia Ruiz Soro

The calle de Antonia Ruiz Soro keeps its secret better than almost any other: two hundred and fifty-two meters in the Guindalera neighborhood, named in 1928, and at the end of them a woman’s name about whom almost nothing is known. The neighborhood grew fast between 1890 and the 1930s. As the streets opened, the city council named them in its sessions: owners who ceded land, local figures, benefactresses of whom barely a trace remained beyond the neighborhood. A 2004 municipal document that gathered the women’s names on the map records her without a single line of biography: named in 1928, Salamanca district, and little else. Most likely she was a neighbor who gave up her plot or helped the area, someone valued enough to merit a plaque and of so little public profile that she left no mark in the national archives. Anyone passing by reads a full name, with its two surnames, and meets a flesh-and-blood person of whom time preserved only that: what she was called.