Calle de Eustaquio Rodríguez

The Calle de Eustaquio Rodríguez is a short, quiet stretch in the Vallehermoso neighborhood, a step from the Ríos Rosas metro. The name points to a person, but there the certainty ends: no reliable record survives of who he was or why Madrid chose to remember him in this corner of Chamberí. The street was born with the expansion of old Vallehermoso, the area built up during the nineteenth century over what had been orchards and cleared ground. Into that grid of regular blocks were opened short streets like this one, sometimes named after owners or residents whose memory time slowly erased. At number 1 stands a 1934 building with Art Deco lines, the sober geometry that flourished in Chamberí between the two wars. Of Eustaquio Rodríguez, on the other hand, nothing remains beyond the street’s own name.