Calle de Manuel Montilla

The name points to a person, Manuel Montilla, but who he was and why Madrid set aside a street for him has gone undocumented. There is no record of his life or the merit that earned him the dedication, and little more of him survives than the surname fixed on a plaque. What is known is the ground it treads. The calle de Manuel Montilla is a short street in Nueva España, one of the districts that passed to Madrid when Chamartín de la Rosa ceased to be its own town, in 1948. Its blocks went up mostly in the second half of the twentieth century, in a residential area that is quiet and tree-lined today, east of the Castellana, where the surname stayed on the sign without the street register noting whom it honoured.