Calle Canalillo
The street takes its name from the irrigation channel popularly known as “el Canalillo,” the eastern branch of the Canal de Isabel II built in 1868. The curved layout of the street reproduces the physical trace of the channel, closed as an irrigation route in 1967 and gone by the 1970s.
Before there was a street, there was water running in the open air. Madrileños called it el Canalillo, and that affectionate nickname ended up naming the street.
The channel rose at the Casa Partidor, at what is now the junction of Pablo Iglesias and San Francisco de Sales, and ran some ten kilometres above ground. Juan de Ribera Piferrer had designed it to water Madrid’s fields with the waters of the Lozoya: by around 1866 the city consumed only a fraction of the available flow, so water was left over and needed an outlet. Its banks were lined with acacias, poplars and mulberries, and the water supplied the brickworks and potteries that worked the clay across the whole eastern sector of the city.
By the 1960s its days were numbered: irrigation stopped in 1967 and the channel vanished from the landscape during the 1970s. The popular name came long before any official sign; Galdós had already recorded it in Tristana (1892), when he describes walks “to the Partidor, to the Canalillo, or toward the heights overlooking the Hippodrome.”
Sources (6)
- Canalillo — Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
- Acequia de riego del Este de Madrid: el «canalillo» — Urban Idade
- El Canalillo a la altura de la Guindalera y Parque de las Avenidas — Por las calles de Madrid
- El Canalillo de Madrid — Historias matritenses
- Juan de Ribera Piferrer — Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
- Tristana — Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes