Calle de las Platerías

The name comes from a trade. A platería is the silversmith’s workshop, the shop where his work in gold and silver is sold, and by extension the street or district where those craftsmen gathered. Hence, in the plural, Platerías: the place of the silversmiths. The street keeps the memory of a vanished village. Before Madrid annexed it, Chamartín de la Rosa was a dry-farming hamlet of some thirty houses, and this street served as the main axis of the settlement. Around it, in time, rose a tahona and a tannery. Whether silversmiths ever worked on the street, or whether the sign merely carried a borrowed trade name from the town out to the village, is not on record. The street runs on today into that of the Caídos de la División Azul, and at its corner with the far end of the Paseo de la Habana survives the Quinta de San Enrique, a small palace the French financier Louis Guilhou built when threshing floor and stubble still surrounded it.