Calle de Ángel Puech

The name rescues a resident of early twentieth-century Tetuán, when the district was still a shantytown of low houses with no services. Ángel Puech was among the seventy-odd inhabitants who, in the 1910s, pooled small sums until they had gathered 7,500 pesetas so that the Sociedad Hidráulica de Santillana would bring running water to their streets. They paid out of their own pockets for what the authorities would not provide, and nothing of his life survives beyond that gesture. The street is short and crosses calle del Matadero, a name that betrays the semi-rural past of this corner of Valdeacederas. At that junction, on the wall of an empty lot, residents later painted a mural with their own faces, on one of the corners where water itself once ran short.