Calle de la Retama

Broom is one of those plants that survives where almost nothing grows. A woody shrub with yellow flowers, it raises green, supple, nearly bare branches; it thrives in poor, dry, sunlit soil, the same arid ground that surrounded Madrid before the city swallowed it. Its name comes from the Arabic ratama. No record survives of why this shrub was chosen to name the street. It fits the Madrid habit of dedicating streets to plants of the nearby countryside, and here the coincidence is a happy one: the name Atocha itself comes from another humble plant of those wastelands. Calle de la Retama runs through the railway and industrial zone of southern Arganzuela, near Méndez Álvaro, a stretch of almost seven hundred meters between warehouses and tracks. A shrub of the scrubland names one of the most mechanical arteries of the district, where once there were orchards and the murmur of the Manzanares.