Calle de Nicaragua

Nicaragua entered Madrid’s street map through the same door as its neighbours. The Hispanoamérica district was mostly developed from the 1970s on, and its streets were named after countries and cities of Spanish-speaking America: around it lie Honduras, Uruguay and Bolivia, a map of the Americas laid out between avenida de Alberto Alcocer and avenida de Concha Espina. The country that gives the street its name is the largest in Central America, a land of lakes and volcanoes between the Pacific and the Caribbean. At number 12 stands the Greek Orthodox cathedral of Saints Andrew and Demetrius, built in the Byzantine style with its bell tower. The foundation stone was laid in 1971, and it was granted cathedral rank in 2006. Inside it holds an iconostasis and paintings by Greek artists: beneath the sign of a tropical country rise domes and icons from the eastern Mediterranean.