Calle de Montoya

Montoya began as a place name before it was a surname. In Álava there was a village called Montoya, now vanished, and from that toponym came the surname that later spread across Spain and reached the Americas. Calle de Montoya falls in La Ventilla, within Almenara, in a grid of modest streets that gathered laborers from the countryside during the twentieth century. A short walk away runs Calle de Carmen Montoya, with which it shares a root. Why the street register fixed this name here is not recorded: whether to evoke the Álava village, to honor someone named Montoya, or simply to add another name to the district. Today it is a short, residential street whose name comes from a village that no longer exists.