Calle de los Lirios

The iris gives its name to this street for the same reason as its neighbours Áster and Tilos: it belongs to an estate that organised its street names around plants. Calle de los Lirios runs along one of the edges of the Colonia Bosque y Minas, built around 1930 on an almost trapezoidal layout of small houses with gardens, very much in the garden-city spirit that spread through the old Chamartín de la Rosa. The lirio behind the name is the plant of sword-shaped leaves and upright flowers that in Spanish means both the iris and, in popular use, the lily. Its silhouette carries centuries of symbolic weight: the fleur-de-lis that crowned European coats of arms and banners is a stylised iris, an emblem of purity and, in Christian iconography, an attribute of the Annunciation. Anyone walking the street today finds low façades and trees rather than iris beds. There is no record of why this flower was chosen over the many others the area’s street names spread about. The iris was fixed as a neighbour of the limes and the asters, a small stone herbarium in the north of Madrid.