Calle Bremen
The street takes its name from Bremen, a free Hanseatic city in northwest Germany, on the banks of the Weser. It belongs to the Parque de las Avenidas residential development, promoted by CIOHSA in the mid-20th century, where all the streets were given the names of cities starting with B. The place name Bremen comes from the Old Saxon bremo (‘edge’), a reference to its site beside the river.
In the Parque de las Avenidas neighbourhood, built over old market gardens and the course of the Abroñigal stream, someone decided the streets would bear the names of European cities beginning with B. Bonn, Berna, Bolonia, Brescia, Burdeos, Boston, Berlín, Basilea, Brasilia and Bremen form a little Europe of repeated initials around the Avenida de Bruselas. The only one that breaks the game is the Plaza de Venecia. Who devised the scheme and why it began with B remains unknown.
The neighbourhood was born in haste: the developer CIOHSA obtained the Council’s permission in July 1956, and the works closed around 1969. Behind the plan were architects Francisco Echenique Gómez and Luis Calvo Huedo.
The Calle Bremen owes its name to a city in northern Germany, a river port on the Weser since the Middle Ages. Its weight came from trade: in 1358 it joined the Hanseatic League, the alliance of merchant cities that dominated Baltic and North Sea traffic for centuries.