Calle de las Peñuelas

A peñuela is a small crag, the diminutive of the rock that breaks the surface. Here, in the sandy, stony south of Madrid, there was one of those modest rises: the peñuela of Santa Isabel, beside the Campillo del Mundo Nuevo. From that mound the railway station, the square and this Calle de las Peñuelas took their name, which later spread to a whole working-class district. Of the original rock nothing remains. For centuries this was land of the Dehesa de Arganzuela, pasture along the banks of the Manzanares. With the Castro Plan of 1860 the expansion began, and working families came to Las Peñuelas and raised courtyard houses and tenement blocks. The district breathed that factory air that Galdós and Blasco Ibáñez portrayed in their novels, with the gas works a stone’s throw away. The crag that gave the name vanished under the asphalt; the water of an old fountain nearby took far longer to fall silent.