Calle de María Luisa

Barely a hundred and seventeen meters are enough to cross the calle de María Luisa, a small street in the Berruguete district bearing a name as common as it is guarded. It was earlier called calle de San Eduardo, and in March 1887 it changed to the present one. No record survives of which woman it honors: the name was adopted without noting whether it evoked a relative, a neighbor, or an affection of the owner who parceled out this land. Berruguete grew in the late nineteenth century, when the fields stretching beyond Tetuán’s old fielato were divided into private hands and narrow streets were opened for modest houses of laborers and day workers. In those outlying developments it was common to name streets with women’s first names, explained by nothing more than the developer’s whim. The calle de María Luisa still keeps the scale of those low houses.