Calle de Fernando Poo
The name recalls the African island of Fernando Poo, now Bioko, in former Spanish Guinea, which took the surname of the Portuguese navigator who sighted it around 1472.
Behind this sign in La Chopera lies an island in the Gulf of Guinea. Around 1472 the Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó sighted it, and in time the island took his surname, fixed in Spanish as Fernando Poo. Portuguese and Dutch disputed it until the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1778 handed it to Spain.
The island was the heart of Spanish Guinea, an African possession of the crown until 1968. In its last colonial years it held the status of a province, with one singular detail: its cars carried their own license plates, marked FP. After the independence of Equatorial Guinea it was renamed Bioko, the name it keeps today. The street runs between the calle del General Palanca and the paseo de la Chopera, in a stretch of Arganzuela that grew with the factories beside the Manzanares.