Calle de Belalcázar

The street inherits the name of Belalcázar, a town in the northern hills of Córdoba, in the Los Pedroches district. The name describes a building: “beautiful fortress,” after the castle the Sotomayor family raised there in the 15th century, which still crowns the hill with its keep, the tallest in Spain. The town was not always called that. In Roman times it sounded like Gahet; under Andalusi rule it was Gafiq, a fortified frontier post; after the Christian conquest it became Gahete again. The present name arose around 1466, when Elvira de Zúñiga renamed the place upon completing the family fortress. The name fits the logic of the El Viso estate, laid out in the 1930s as a district of low houses beside calle de Serrano. Its streets borrow names from Spanish geography —⁠rivers such as the Sil or the Tormes, towns from across the country⁠— so that walking the neighbourhood means crossing a small map of Spain made of white villas.