Calle de Jaén

This street’s sign recalls Jaén, capital of the Andalusian province of the same name, set among olive groves and watched over by the castle of Santa Catalina. Jaén fits into Cuatro Caminos in an area where several roads bear the names of Spanish cities and provinces —⁠nearby run those dedicated to Palencia, Teruel, Salamanca, and Lérida⁠— a device much to the taste of Madrid’s urban planning as the neighborhood grew in the shadow of Bravo Murillo. The city’s place name has a longer history than the street itself. Against those who take it for Arabic, scholars trace it to a Latin name of ownership, a villa Gaiena linked to the personal name Gaius, which the Andalusi population reinterpreted as Ŷayyān during the centuries of Muslim rule. From that medieval Yayyán the modern Castilian form derives. Cuatro Caminos grew in the late nineteenth century as a working-class slum beyond the limit of the ensanche, and its streets were ordered with these names of Spanish lands.