Calle de los Machegos

The name points to La Mancha. Machego works here as a variant of manchego, a native of that Castilian land; in fact the street registers waver between the two spellings for this same street: sometimes Machegos, sometimes Manchegos. The dropped n was fixed into the official sign, with no documented record of why. The street belongs to Valdeacederas, one of the six neighbourhoods of Tetuán, built on the outskirts of early twentieth-century Madrid as a district of low houses. Many who came from the fields of Castile and across the country settled here, drawn by work and cheap rents on the city’s edge, and several streets took the names of Spanish lands and peoples. The neighbourhood itself owes its name to a humbler fact: Val de acederas, the valley of the sorrels, the sour herb that grew beside the streams before the streets gridded the landscape. Barely ninety metres of pavement to name a whole region’s people.