Calle de Cenicientos
Named after Cenicientos, a village in Madrid’s western sierra, in the neighbourhood custom of naming streets after towns of the region.
The street takes its name from Cenicientos, a village at the western edge of the Madrid region, in the Sierra Oeste, close to the borders of Toledo and Ávila. Naming a neighbourhood’s streets after the region’s towns was a Madrid custom, and that is how this mountain place-name landed in Tetuán.
The reason behind the village’s name is still open. The most repeated explanation is a legend: the place was supposedly called San Esteban de la Encina and, during the Reconquest, when the king demanded lances from Toledo, the mayor is said to have answered that His Majesty could count on “cien y cientos” (a hundred and hundreds). Philology prefers to look toward ceniza, “ash”: the grey of the granite crags around the village.
The village already appears as Cenicientos in the 14th-century Libro de la Montería. Its people carry a name for themselves that baffles everyone: coruchos.