Calle de los Molinos

The name refers to the mills: the works where grain became flour before it went to the oven. Along the streams and riverbanks around Madrid, flour mills worked for centuries, and the flour they produced kept the city supplied with bread. Which mill, which building or which local memory gave its name to this street in the Berruguete neighbourhood does not appear in the surviving records. The name points to a milling works, but the precise reason for it is undocumented. The neighbourhood belongs to the district of Tetuán, whose name recalls the 1860 war in Africa. Its real growth came later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the arrival of working people who settled north of the city, along the old carretera de Francia, in dense and modest streets. Whoever walks calle de los Molinos treads a name tied to milling and bread, with its founding mill long lost.