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.