Calle de Pechuán

The name takes up the surname Pechuán, of Valencian origin, but the exact reason is undocumented: no record has survived of who the honoured person was or why the sign was placed. The place itself is known. Pechuán runs through Ciudad Jardín, in Chamartín, an area shaped in the 1920s and 1930s by the housing colonies built for clerks and professionals. That planning of low houses with gardens, inspired by the English garden city, left a neighbourhood of short streets and dense trees, unlike the Madrid of closed blocks growing nearby. Over time, the villas gave ground to blocks of flats. At number 12 lived the writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, author of El Jarama and Cervantes laureate; a plaque on the façade recalls him.