Calle de los Mártires de la Ventilla

In the early twentieth century, La Ventilla was a shanty district on the edge of the town of Chamartín de la Rosa: undeveloped land, poor residents, most of them illiterate. There the brothers Juan and Demetrio de Andrés, two lay teachers, began teaching children and adults in a house on this very street. In 1931 they helped raise a school, church and clinic, the first formal schooling the neighbourhood had known. In 1936, accused of siding with the rebels, the two brothers were shot on the old carretera de Francia, near where the La Paz hospital now stands. Madrid named the street after them in 1959, over what had plainly been called calle del Vertedero, the rubbish-dump street. The calling to teach did not die with them. In 1966 the Padre Piquer vocational school opened on this street, heir to that shanty-town school. Calle de los Mártires de la Ventilla runs briefly between San Aquilino and Magnolias, in the heart of Almenara.