Calle de Luis Larrainza

The street was born with the neighbourhood it anchors. Between 1926 and 1935 an affordable-housing company built the Colonia de la Prosperidad on land in Chamartín, near the Ramón y Cajal axis, and commissioned the project from the architect Luis Larrainza Vignau. When the estate came to name its streets, the central axis that orders them took on the name of the man who drew the plan. Larrainza belonged to the generation that shaped the affordable-housing estates of interwar Madrid. Here he drew an orthogonal grid of elongated blocks, with a square plaza at its heart and a network of narrow streets that give the whole an air of an Italian village grafted onto the city. His hand can also be recognised in the nearby Mirasierra estate. Anyone walking the calle de Luis Larrainza today follows the backbone he traced himself: the street that distributes access to the houses is still, almost a century later, the original line on the plan.