Calle de Melilla

The street recalls Melilla, the Spanish city looking out over the Mediterranean facing the Moroccan coast. Its urban history begins long before the Spanish one: around the eighth century BC the Phoenicians founded there a trading post they called Rusaddir, and the site later passed through Carthaginian and Roman hands before being left empty. The present name has an uncertain origin. It has been linked to the Latin root mel, honey, for the bees that appeared on ancient coins of the area; in Tamazight the form Tamlilt, “the white one,” has been proposed, for the limestone of the ground. No explanation prevails. It came to the Crown of Castile in September 1497, when an expedition in the service of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, led by Pedro de Estopiñán, took the town, then abandoned. From that day Melilla has never ceased to be Spanish. The street makes its way through the Las Acacias district, in Arganzuela.