Calle de los Cedros

The name honours the cedar, the broad-crowned tree of aromatic wood that antiquity linked to grandeur and long life. The word came into Spanish from the Greek kédros. The most famous, the cedar of Lebanon, stands on that country’s flag and appears in the Bible as the wood Solomon used to raise the temple in Jerusalem. The street recalls no particular cedar planted here. It belongs to a stretch of Almenara where the streets were named in a series after plants: nearby run Pinos Alta and Pinos Baja, Magnolias, Geranios, Palmera and Heliótropo. In that botanical neighbourhood, Cedros supplies the most solemn tree. The district grew north of Madrid on former pasture land, still far from the old town, as these plots slowly filled with modest housing.