Calle de José María de Castro

The calle de José María de Castro bears the name of a person, but no reliable record survives of who he was or why the street is so called. He should not be confused with Carlos María de Castro, the engineer who laid out Madrid’s Ensanche from 1860: they share a surname, not an identity, and crediting this street to the planner would have no basis. The stretch, barely a hundred meters, belongs to Cuatro Caminos. The neighborhood grew up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along the old road to France, now Bravo Murillo, when families arriving from different regions built low houses on what were then the outskirts. Many of those streets took the names of local people whose identity never reached the official records, and this is one more mystery among the neighborhood’s streets.