Calle Berlín
The name refers to the German capital. The street belongs to the Parque de las Avenidas development, built in La Guindalera (Salamanca district) under the 1954 Limited-Rent Housing Act. The developer CIOHSA named all its streets after cities beginning with B, though no documentary source explains the criterion.
Where the Parque de las Avenidas neighbourhood now stands, at the bottom of the Abroñigal stream valley, there were flower and vegetable gardens that lasted into the 1950s. The developer CIOHSA obtained municipal permission in 1956 and began building more than two thousand middle-class homes.
The neighbourhood hands out the names of European cities beginning with B, a series that starts at the Avenida de Bruselas and runs down to the smallest streets. Berlín got in with no special claim, just one more capital on the list. The story goes that the first sign for the Plaza de Venecia was written “Plaza de Benecia,” with a B, so as not to break the rule, though no municipal record backs it up.
The name Berlin comes from West Slavic: the root berl-/birl- named waterlogged ground, the marshy soil on the banks of the river Spree where the settlement was born. The popular link to the bear is a later invention that linguists dismiss.