Calle de Martínez Page

The sign names a Martínez Page of whom no reliable trace remains. Neither the municipal register nor the neighborhood chronicles explain who he was or why this street in Tetuán’s far north was dedicated to him. The street lies in Almenara, the neighborhood many still call La Ventilla. Here the urban fabric grew haphazardly from the late nineteenth century, when families newly arrived in Madrid built self-made low houses beyond the city limit. Much of that housing was demolished during the neighborhood’s long redevelopment, between the 1980s and the 2000s. Martínez Page survives as a short stretch within that renewed fabric.