Calle de Francisco Cabo

The calle de Francisco Cabo is a short stretch of the Almenara neighbourhood, beside Valdeacederas, bearing a person’s name and little more. Barely a hundred metres between blocks of workers' housing, with no plaque to explain whom it recalls or what he did. The surname points to a specific Francisco Cabo, but no record of who he was has survived. It shared this ground with other streets named in the same period, when Tetuán de las Victorias grew on the outskirts of Madrid in disorderly fashion. Each owner of a plot sold it to a builder, the houses went up as best they could, and the emerging streets took the names of people whose memory, in many cases, was lost within a single generation. Anyone walking it today will find the everyday bustle of a working-class neighbourhood in the north of the city. The name is still up, but of the person it honours only this has reached us: what he was called.