Calle de Manzanares

The street runs close by the river that gives it its name, the same Manzanares that girds the Imperial district to the west and south before heading on toward the Jarama. The place name comes from the noun manzanar, land planted with apple trees, and points to the groves that once covered the river’s upper basin, up in the sierra where Manzanares el Real now sits. Of those apple trees nothing remains, but the name traveled downstream. The river was not always so called. In the Middle Ages it was known as the Guadarrama, and only from the seventeenth century did it take the name of the lordship of the Real de Manzanares. Its meager flow earned it the mockery of the Golden Age wits. Quevedo called it a “stream apprenticed to a river,” and the joke ran that it was navigable on horseback. That modest thread of water marked the birth of Madrid: beside it rose the fortress that watched over the ford, the core from which the town grew.