Calle de Isabel Serrano

Of Isabel Serrano no documented record survives: not who she was, nor where she came from, nor why her surname was fixed on the map. The gesture answers to a common practice on Madrid’s outskirts in the first half of the twentieth century, when the landowners who ceded or sold plots to be built up saw their name placed on the plaques of the new streets. The calle de Isabel Serrano runs through Valdeacederas, one of Tetuán’s neighborhoods. The name comes from val de acederas, the valley of the sorrels, the wild sour-leaved plant that grew on this low land, once crossed by streams and vegetable gardens.