Calle de Molina

The name sounds like a place before a person. On the map of Spain there are several Molinas that could lie behind it: Molina de Aragón, the walled town of the Upper Tagus; Molina de Segura, in the Murcian farmland; or the countless villages named after an old water mill. The word comes from the Latin molina, the machine that grinds grain. Which of them named this street is what is not documented. The calle de Molina is a short residential street in the Almenara district, between the plaza de Donoso and the paseo de la Dirección. Its neighbors —⁠calle de Marcelina, calle de Carmen Montoya, calle de Pinos Alta⁠— mix names of people and places with no pattern to tie this Molina to a particular town. The district around it was born late and in a hurry. Tetuán grew north of Madrid after the 1860 African campaign, when low houses and workshops rose around a camp that became permanent. In that working-class outskirt, many streets were named with modest place-names, without the solemnity of the center.