Calle de los Bascones

The name travels from the bleak uplands of northern Castile. Several small villages are called Báscones —⁠de Ojeda, de Valdivia, de Ebro in Palencia, and others in Burgos and Asturias⁠— all with the same ancient echo: Vascones, the name the Romans gave the tribe settled around what is now Navarre. When, in the Middle Ages, people from that Basque-Navarrese world settled the high valleys of Castile, they left their trace in these minor place names. No record survives of why the street planners of Almenara chose this particular village. The street belongs to old Tetuán de las Victorias, the shanty district that grew north of Madrid from the mid-nineteenth century, first as a cluster of day-labourers' houses and later as a working-class neighbourhood annexed to the capital. Barely two hundred metres of pavement to name a handful of northern hamlets.