Calle de Manuel Ferrero

The name recalls a Manuel Ferrero of whom we know almost nothing. No reliable record has survived of who he was: no profession, no dates, no reason for the tribute. Reasonable guesses and little more remain: a resident, a landowner, someone with weight in local life whom time erased from written memory. Where the street comes from is clear enough. Manuel Ferrero is one of the surviving layouts of the old village of Chamartín de la Rosa, the independent town Madrid absorbed in 1948. When the Castilla district went up in the late 1950s, with its towers around the plaza de Castilla, this street already existed. That is why it still holds low, one-storey-and-attic houses, survivors of the rural hamlet, wedged between office blocks. Today the street’s number 1 houses the district’s public library, among the low houses that watched the village pass by.