Calle Bondad

One of the two inner streets of the Postmen’s Colony, a cluster of single-family homes built in La Guindalera from 1922 by the Postmen’s Cooperative of Affordable Housing. The cooperative proposed the name “Maximum Kindness”; the adjective fell out of use before the official signposting, and the street was added to the municipal street map as Bondad in 1934.

Where the Postmen’s Colony now stands, on the eastern edge of La Guindalera, there was a market garden belonging to Pedro Orcasitas Ruiz, whose surname named another street in the neighbourhood. In 1922, under the Affordable Housing Act, a group of postmen formed a cooperative to build their own homes on that land. Architect Enrique Martí Perla designed some fifty semi-detached houses, with rendered façades and Flemish-inspired stepped gables. The cluster was named Grupo Thebussiano, after Mariano Pardo de Figueroa, a writer and lover of good food who signed as Doctor Thebussem and whom the postal service named Spain’s first honorary postman. For the inner lanes, the postmen chose names with a message: Máxima Bondad and Máxima Belleza. The “Máxima” fell away along the road, and in 1934, when the streets were finally paved, they entered the municipal street map as Bondad and Belleza, plain and simple.

Sources (7)