Calle de Aranjuez

The street takes its name from Aranjuez, the town in the south of the province where the Tagus and the Jarama water the gardens that Philip II raised to a Royal Site in 1560. The naming fits the logic of Bellas Vistas, a neighbourhood that grew in the late nineteenth century with people arriving from the countryside to Madrid, and whose streets took on the names of Spanish towns and cities like someone assembling a small map of the peninsula. The origin of the place-name, on the other hand, remains open. The most repeated theory derives it from the Basque arantza, “thornbush”; in medieval texts the name shifts for centuries —⁠Arauz, Aranz, Aranzueque⁠— before settling as Aranjuez in the fifteenth century. Whoever walks these two hundred and ninety metres between modest façades today treads, unknowingly, over the echo of the royal gardens on the Tagus.