Calle Arenal de Maudes

The name keeps the memory of a soil. Along this stretch of northern Madrid ran a sandy ground, formed by the seasonal watercourses that rose in the area, where drying out in summer left a strip of loose sand. That trace of soft earth was fixed in the street map as Arenal de Maudes, before the urban grid of Nueva España covered the old landscape of orchards and gullies. The surname comes from a hamlet —⁠the village of Maudes⁠— that belonged to the municipality of Chamartín de la Rosa and stood where the plaza de Cuzco is today. A road led toward it that the city’s growth erased beneath the Castellana. The ultimate meaning of the word is not settled, but its trace recurs across the neighborhood, from the street to the Maudes hospital, that fortress of brick and slate that still watches over the north like a castle out of place.