Calle de Antonio Lanzuela

The name points to a person, Antonio Lanzuela, but that is where anything certain stops. No reliable record survives of who he was or why Madrid wished to fix his name in this corner of Valdeacederas. What remains is the ground it runs over. Valdeacederas grew in the early twentieth century as an extension of the old Tetuán de las Victorias shantytown, a neighbourhood of low houses and modest plots developed through private initiative before the city absorbed it. Many of its streets took the names of people now obscure: owners, residents, local figures whose memory was never recorded. Antonio Lanzuela seems to belong to that line of inherited names with no footnote, two hundred and forty-five metres of asphalt that call out to someone no one can picture any more.