Calle Begoña

A street honouring the Basilica of Begoña, patroness of Biscay, though its Madrid story begins far from any shrine: on the drawing board of a Navarrese developer with a fondness for Basque place names. In the mid-1920s, Gregorio Iturbe bought land beside the Quinta de la Fuente del Berro and built a colony of small villas there. He signed the neighbourhood with the geography of his homeland: alongside Begoña he named other streets Aralar and Aizgorri, and in a later colony he handed out the names of northern rivers. The name comes from Basque: beko, “the lower one,” and oña, a small rise. Together they trace the slope falling toward the estuary of the Nervión below the Artagan massif. The place name travelled from Biscay to a Madrid map, and no one left a record of who decided it should stay.

The anteiglesia of Begoña resisted annexation to Bilbao for decades; when the Royal Decree of 1924 finally incorporated it, its mayor Ernesto Allende handed the makila to the Bilbao councillor in a ceremony that closed at Atxuri with the reading of the Carta Puebla. That same year saw the start in Madrid of the Colonia Iturbe, which took the name of the Bilbao hill for one of its streets.