Calle Antonio Zapata

The name evokes Antonio Zapata y Cisneros, born in Madrid in 1550, the firstborn son of the first Count of Barajas. He gave up the title in favor of his brother and chose the Church: he rose to cardinal, viceroy of Naples and inquisitor general, and in his eighties retired to the town of Barajas, where he died in 1635. The surname became tied to southeastern Madrid when his father received the county of Barajas. When Prosperidad came into being in 1862 as a suburb of low houses northeast of Madrid, its streets were labeled with those echoes of local history, and the calle de Antonio Zapata still keeps a few 19th-century buildings, witnesses of the original neighborhood.