Calle Bendición de Campos

Before Madrid grew northward and the Nueva España district went up, “blessing of the fields” named a gesture of the farming calendar. Each spring, around the rogations before the Ascension, the priest would go out with cross and holy water to walk the sown lands: the furrows were sprinkled and heaven was asked to keep off drought and hail. On that harvest depended the year’s bread. The custom came from medieval rural Catholicism and is still kept alive in villages of Castile and the Basque Country. Turned into a street name, it holds that air of a blessed field in the heart of Chamartín, among office blocks. Why this phrase was chosen for the street is not recorded.