Calle Candelaria Mora

The sign of the Calle Candelaria Mora holds a woman’s name with the plainness of someone remembered more in the neighbourhood than in the archives. Who she was, when she lived and what prompted the dedication is not reliably known: the origin of the name is undocumented. The street is short, barely seventy-odd metres, in the Legazpi area. Here twentieth-century Madrid had its municipal slaughterhouse and its fruit and vegetable market, built beside the Manzanares; over the years the old Matadero was turned into a cultural centre, and the neighbourhood grew up around that work. Candelaria comes from the feast of 2 February, a day of lit candles that gives its name to many women on the Catholic calendar. Mora is a surname widespread across the peninsula. Together they point to a particular person whose trace never reached the official record.