Calle de la Rábida

The name travels from a cliff in Huelva. There, above the estuary where the Tinto and the Odiel meet, stands the Franciscan monastery of La Rábida, the house that took in Christopher Columbus around 1485, when he was dragging his venture along without finding anyone to back it. Within those walls he found the friars who opened the door to the court and put him in touch with the shipowners of Palos. The word is older than the convent. It comes from the Arabic ribāṭ: a small fortress-monastery raised on the coastal frontier, where Muslim ascetics prayed and, when the need arose, watched the sea. The Christian building inherited the site and the place-name. In the street map of Bellas Vistas, la Rábida is one of many names Madrid scattered across its neighborhoods to evoke distant geographies. Here there is no estuary or cliff, but a short street of working-class Tetuán that grew at the end of the nineteenth century. Whoever reads the plaque aloud pronounces, without knowing it, a word that before speaking of Columbus spoke of sentinels facing the Atlantic.