Calle de Alejandro Dumas
Honours the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, though it is unclear whether it is dedicated to the father, author of The Three Musketeers, or the son, author of The Lady of the Camellias.
Before it bore a French name, this street was called de las Cambroneras, after the boxthorn, the spiny shrub that grew freely in a wasteland of humble houses that madrileños from the centre saw as a distant, inhospitable edge of the city. Industrialisation erased that landscape and brought the cultured name.
The man honoured is Alexandre Dumas, but the street map never made clear which of the two. The father signed The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. The son left The Lady of the Camellias, which Verdi turned into La Traviata. The ambiguity remains unresolved.
The street runs a few steps from the Manzanares, and there lies the coincidence. To Dumas the father, passing through Madrid, tradition attributes a famous jibe: he asked a water seller for half a glass of water, drank half and gave back the rest, begging him to pour it into the river, which sorely needed it. The mockery of the Manzanares’s thin flow ended up naming a street on the bank of the very river it teased.