Calle de las Delicias
Named after the old tree-lined promenade that eighteenth-century Madrid called “the delights of the river” for its pleasant air and scenery on the way to the Manzanares.
The name comes from a simple pleasure: strolling. In the mid-eighteenth century, under Ferdinand VI, Madrid extended the tree-lined axis of the Prado southward toward the Manzanares, and that shaded stretch became a place to meet. The countryside came into the city, the air ran clean and the river showed its kindest face. Madrileños began to call the place “the delights of the river,” and the word caught on. Calle de las Delicias inherits that nickname from the nearby Paseo de las Delicias.
The delights lasted as long as an undefended landscape does. The nineteenth-century expansion declared the area industrial, the belt railway arrived, and the elms gave way to warehouses and chimneys. In 1880 the Delicias station opened here, Madrid’s first permanent terminal, today the Railway Museum. The trees went; the name stayed, spread among a street, a promenade, a district and two stations.