Calle de Benjamín

Benjamín is what it seems: a first name of biblical root, that of the youngest son of Jacob and Rachel, the one his mother called as she died Ben-oni, “son of my sorrow”, and whom his father renamed Benjamin, “son of the right hand”. From this comes the common use of the word for the youngest in a family. What was never written down is why this corner of Valdeacederas chose that name. Benjamín belongs to a curiosity of Madrid’s street map: streets with only a first name, barely forty in the whole city and almost all in former annexed villages and informally developed districts like Tetuán. They arose when these lands were parcelled out and lanes were opened almost by hand, and in many cases the identity was never recorded. Today Benjamín points to no one in particular: a name that crosses Miosotis, beside an early twentieth-century house of neo-Mudéjar brick.