Calle de la Charca Verde
Takes its name from the green pond it evokes, an image of water and vegetation whose real trace has not survived.
The name sketches a scene rather than a person: a pond of green water, thick with aquatic plants, of the kind that formed on the empty lots of northern Madrid when this area was field and garden. The street runs beside a vacant lot that bore the same name, opposite the school of the Santamarca Foundation. Whether a pond truly existed there or the name only preserves an image of the landscape, no record survives.
The place name fits the naturalist logic of the surroundings, an inheritance of the Garden City dream that gave the district its name: low houses, plots with gardens, and streets christened with words that smelled of the countryside. Today the calle de la Charca Verde slopes down toward calle de Pradillo, paved and quiet, with no water but the water of its name.