Calle de Antonio Guzmán
A street in the Prosperidad neighbourhood dedicated to an Antonio Guzmán whose identity was never recorded in the street register.
The municipal street register lists calle de Antonio Guzmán in the Prosperidad neighbourhood, but does not clarify which Antonio Guzmán it honours. No record survives of who he was: no profession, no dates, no decision that resolved to name it after him. The visitor who walks it reads a common Spanish name with no biography attached.
The surroundings do offer a hint by company. The street is flanked by ones such as Antonio Zapata and Antonio Rodríguez Villa, the latter dedicated to a Madrid archivist and historian. That neighbourhood of scholars suggests a tribute of the same kind, though the point is not documented.
The neighbourhood that holds them was born in 1862, when an owner named Próspero divided his land north of Madrid to sell it in small lots. From that suburb of vegetable plots, melon fields and low houses came Prosperidad, whose layout still keeps, in some blocks, the outline of the original estates. Calle de Antonio Guzmán belongs to that grid inherited from early speculation, a scant sixty metres that anyone crosses in half a minute.