Calle de Luis Villa
A 67-metre pedestrian street in the inner grid of the Salamanca Ensanche, Goya neighbourhood. It owes its name to a Luis Villa whom sources cannot identify: Répide does not record it, Madripedia has no entry and the City Council’s digital gazetteer gives neither date nor biographical figure.
In the Goya neighbourhood, within the eastern Ensanche that Carlos María de Castro planned from 1860, Calle de Luis Villa runs barely sixty-seven metres and is walked on foot alone. The development laid out great axes like Goya, Serrano and Velázquez, and left minor service passages between them. One of those passages was named by municipal agreements signed between 1870 and 1900.
And there lies the riddle: no one knows for certain who Luis Villa was. The guides to Madrid’s street names and today’s gazetteers stay silent. What little remains records him as a person with a first and last name but of unknown context.
The most reasonable explanation points to a landowner or property developer who worked in the area during the last third of the nineteenth century, when the Ensanche grew plot by sold plot. Sixty-seven metres of street that keep a person of whom only the name survives.