Calle Cabeza Reina

In the Colonia de la Prosperidad, within the Garden City that Madrid raised between 1926 and 1935 under the cheap-housing laws, this short street bears a name the street map never came to explain. No record survives of why Cabeza Reina was chosen. The place name, however, exists on the map. There is a hill called Cabeza Reina beside San Rafael, in the Segovian district of El Espinar, a little over an hour from Madrid across the mountains. It was named for its silhouette: a rounded rise that, seen from the plain, recalls a human head peering over the pine woods. That promontory holds a subterranean history. Its quartz veins hid tin and tungsten, and in the nineteenth century the San Quintín and Reina mines were opened there; during the Second World War the deposits came back to life because tungsten was quoted like gold for armour plating and shells. That the Madrid street owes its sign to that mining hill is plausible, but the name is not documented.