Calle de Albendiego

The name comes from northern Guadalajara, where Albendiego is a small village set in a valley at the foot of the Sierra del Alto Rey. Its fame fits in a single building: the church of Santa Coloma, a jewel of rural Romanesque raised in the twelfth century. What sets it apart are the stone lattices of its apse, geometric openwork of Mudéjar root that filters the light like lace carved in granite. The place name has been linked to the battle of Alhándega, a victory of Ramiro II’s Leonese troops over the Córdoban army in the year 939, but this is a disputed and undocumented hypothesis. The street belongs to the Almenara neighbourhood, in Tetuán, where the street names gather towns scattered across the Spanish map. Barely a couple of hundred metres that lend Madrid the echo of a village in the Sierra Norte of Guadalajara and of its church with windows that seem woven.