Calle de Navalafuente

The name comes from a small village in Madrid’s Sierra Norte, some sixty kilometres north of the city. Navalafuente is said to have been founded in the twelfth century, when shepherds drove their flocks up to graze in those mountain meadows and built the first houses around a spring. The place name comes from that spring: the Fuente de la Nava, fused over time into a single word. A nava is a flat, treeless stretch of land, sometimes waterlogged, wedged between mountains. The word is pre-Roman and related to the Basque naba, “plain,” and it has left its mark on hundreds of place names across the northern half of the peninsula. So the street’s name, read backwards, describes a landscape: water welling up in the middle of the mountain plain. In Madrid, Calle de Navalafuente traces one of the edges of the Ciudad Jardín district, the quiet estate of the Chamartín extension.