Calle de Eugenio

A first name alone, with no surname to anchor it: Eugenio. That bareness is the first clue. The streets of Almenara and the rest of Tetuán de las Victorias were born beyond Madrid, when these heights north of the old road to France (today Bravo Murillo) were an outlying district of Chamartín de la Rosa and the layout grew by parcelling out land. Many streets took the name of a neighbour, of whoever divided the plots or built the first houses, and that reason rarely made it into writing. That is the case with Eugenio: no reliable record has survived of whom it refers to or why, and filling the gap would mean inventing. The neighbourhood was annexed to Madrid in 1948. When the duplicated streets inherited from the absorbed villages had to be undone, those around Eugenio filled with flowers —⁠Magnolias starts from its own line⁠— and this stretch of barely one hundred and forty metres kept its plain first name.