Calle de Pérez Ayuso

The plaque honours one Pérez Ayuso, but no record has survived of who he was or why he earned a street. No date, no trade, no feat: only the surname, fixed on the map of a neighbourhood born almost as an experiment. Pérez Ayuso runs through the Ciudad Jardín of Chamartín, also known as the Alfonso XIII colony. On land belonging to the then independent town of Chamartín de la Rosa, the Fomento de la Propiedad company built, from the late 1910s, colonies of single-family houses with gardens, following Ebenezer Howard’s English garden city model. Much of those rows of villas went up in the 1920s, when Madrid had not yet absorbed the town to the north. It is a short, one-way street among railings, vines and low brick façades, linking with Marcenado and Eugenio Salazar.