Calle de Gonzalo Sandino

The street was born with the neighborhood, when Valdeacederas was finishing stitching itself into a grid of blocks north of Tetuán, on land that in the nineteenth century had been vegetable gardens and low houses hugging the Carretera de Francia. The name points to a person: Gonzalo as a first name, Sandino as a surname. That is as far as the certainty goes. No reliable record survives of who that Gonzalo Sandino was or why he was fixed to this short stretch. Whoever walks the street may associate it with the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto César Sandino, but nothing points to that link: the names coincide by chance. Today Gonzalo Sandino is a short passage of just over a hundred and sixty meters, with plain façades and doorways from the seventies.