Calle de Guipúzcoa
It takes its name from the Basque province of Gipuzkoa, within the group of Cuatro Caminos streets named after Spanish provinces in memory of the immigration that peopled the neighborhood.
The name carries a whole province into Madrid. Gipuzkoa, on the Cantabrian coast of the Basque Country, lends its name to this short Cuatro Caminos street, set in a neighborhood where the streets are named like a map of Spain: Cuenca, Oviedo, Palencia, Jaén, Teruel, Ávila, La Coruña. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Cuatro Caminos and Tetuán grew all at once with the arrival of day laborers from across the peninsula, and naming the streets after their provinces was a way of acknowledging where the newcomers came from.
The place name itself holds more history than the street. It is documented in writing from the Middle Ages in forms without the initial g, such as Ipuzcua; that g is a later addition. It is one of the few northern peninsular names to reach us almost intact from before Latinization, though the meaning of its root remains unresolved.