Calle de La Coruña

The name comes from A Coruña, the Atlantic city and the Galician province of the same name, in the far northwest of the Peninsula. The street belongs to a family of streets in Cuatro Caminos named after Spanish provinces and cities: nearby run Orense, Palencia, Oviedo, Cuenca and Ávila too, a small map of Spain drawn over the neighborhood’s street plan. Tetuán grew as a working-class fringe from the mid-nineteenth century, when cheap land north of the old town drew day laborers, rag-pickers and bricklayers who had come from the countryside to an industrializing Madrid. Why these streets were labeled with the names of provinces is not documented, but the result is plain to see: a row of peninsular place-names lined up over the asphalt. That the Galician city is written here as La Coruña and not A Coruña betrays the age of the sign, from a time when the official place-name had not yet returned to its own form.