Calle de los Guindos

The sour cherry tree gives this street its name: a cherry of small leaves and round fruit, smaller and tarter than the common cherry. From its branch comes the guinda, the red, acid berry that crowns cakes and flavours liqueurs. The word came into Spanish from medieval Provençal. The name did not land here by isolated botanical chance. Valdeacederas grew in the late nineteenth century in the lower basin of Tetuán, where streams ran and market gardens spread, worked by day-labourers who came down from the carretera de Francia. That watered past left its mark on the streets: nearby run Crisantemo, Agave, Genciana, Almortas and Cantueso, as if the developers had wanted to keep in the signs what the brick was erasing from the ground. What remains is the tree and its guinda: the small, tart berry that sits right at the top, and which in Spanish came to mean the finishing touch of anything at all.