Calle de la Cereda

The name describes a landscape rather than a person. Cereda is one of a family of words like cerezal and cereceda that name a plot planted with cherry trees. All go back to the Latin cerasetum, from cerasus, the cherry tree, with the suffix that marks an abundance of something in a place. The same root left villages such as Cerecedo and Cerceda on the map of Spain, named for the fruit trees that grew around them. The calle de la Cereda is a short street, barely fifty metres, in the Hispanoamérica neighbourhood, in northern Chamartín, near the avenida de Concha Espina. No record survives of exactly when or why the city chose this word for this stretch. It fits, at any rate, the Madrid habit of naming streets with words drawn from nature and the countryside, an echo of the orchards and groves that covered this ground before the city grew northward.