Calle de Las Carolinas
It recalls the Caroline Islands, the Pacific archipelago that was a Spanish possession and took its name from King Charles II.
The name points far from Tetuán, towards a Pacific archipelago of nearly a thousand islands that for centuries appeared on maps as Spanish territory. The christening came in 1686, when Francisco de Lazcano placed them under the patronage of Charles II, the last Spanish Habsburg. From that tribute came the name now read in this corner of Bellas Vistas, between Bravo Murillo and Olite.
The islands gave Spain a last episode of imperial pride in decline: in 1885, when Germany tried to seize them, Pope Leo XIII ruled in Madrid’s favour; after the disaster of 1898, Spain sold them for twenty-five million pesetas. The street also appears in literature: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez set here, in La horda (1905), the house of an old rag-picker, when the neighbourhood was still a shantytown suburb north of Madrid.