Calle de Luis Portones
A street dedicated to a Luis Portones of whom no record survives — neither who he was nor why the street was named after him.
In the heart of Berruguete, among blocks raised on what a century ago was wasteland and market gardens north of Madrid, runs calle de Luis Portones, barely over two hundred metres linking the fabric of the neighbourhood, with no one at street level knowing any longer whom it recalls.
The name points to a person, one Luis Portones, and little more can be said. No reliable record survives of who he was: no trade, no dates, no reason why the street planners fixed his name to this stretch of Tetuán. All that remains is the proper name on the plaque.
The ground it treads has its own story. Berruguete, well into the twentieth century, was developed quickly to house those arriving in Madrid to look for work. Some of its streets bear the names of people now impossible to identify, and Luis Portones’s is one of them.