Calle de Gabriel Portadales

Who Gabriel Portadales was has gone unrecorded. The name has the shape of a person, with a first name and surname, but no archive explains whom it honors or why this short Valdeacederas street, barely a hundred and fifty meters, was dedicated to him. The blank fits the neighborhood’s history. Valdeacederas, the valley of the sorrels, was built up haphazardly in the first decades of the twentieth century, when Tetuán was still a slum of low houses on the margins of the official map. Many of its minor streets took the surnames of owners, developers, or residents whose memory never made it into the books, and the sign outlived the man.