Calle de Las Naves

A “nave” can be a ship or the great open-roofed shed where a factory keeps its machines. In this corner of Las Acacias the second sense rules. No official record survives of the reason for the name, but the street begins in the very heart of industrial Madrid. For a century Arganzuela was the district of chimneys. Between the river and the railway tracks crowded iron foundries, tanneries, paper mills, the Gas works and the great metalworking shops. Each raised its sheds: long pavilions of brick and iron truss, lined up block after block down to the bank of the Manzanares. Along the Paseo de las Acacias slums piled up, such as Las Injurias, where workers lived a step from the chimney that employed them. Anyone walking its nearly seven hundred meters today will not see a single factory shed. They will see quiet doorways over ground once filled with the noise of metal.