Calle de las Cuevas
A descriptive street of old Tetuán that recalls the caves dug into the sandy ground of Valdeacederas, though no record survives of the exact reason for its name.
The name summons a Madrid that has all but vanished: the embankments and gullies of the north, where soft earth let people carve out hollows with a hoe. Calle de las Cuevas cuts through the fabric of Valdeacederas near Calle de la Hierbabuena, in a district that grew in fits, without a prior plan, over the wastelands surrounding old Tetuán de las Victorias.
No documentary record survives of the reason for the name, but the place name is transparent: there were caves here. In the sandy soil of this strip, dug-out dwellings were opened, the cave-houses where the poorest scraped by when the neighborhood was a border between countryside and city, before shanties and apartment blocks covered any trace of those shelters.
Valdeacederas owes its own name to nature: the “valley of sorrel,” for the sour herb that sprang up in these grounds. Today the visitor walks a short, residential street, with no sign of the earthen galleries that once sank beneath their feet.