Calle de Potosí

The name fits the logic of the barrio de Hispanoamérica, where the streets were laid out like a map of the republics and cities on the far side of the Atlantic. Here Potosí sits alongside Bolivia and Colombia, in a colony that was not fully built up until the 1970s. Potosí is a city on the Bolivian altiplano, raised at the foot of the Cerro Rico, a mountain that in the second half of the sixteenth century came to produce around 60% of all the silver mined in the world. Legend dates the discovery to 1545, when an indigenous shepherd saw the metal glinting among the rocks. By around 1570 the town held more than a hundred thousand people, more than almost any European capital of the age. From that splendour came a phrase still used in Spanish without recalling its source: “valer un potosí”, to be worth a fortune. A few metres away, where the street crosses Bolivia, the Mercado de Chamartín has thrived since 1962, one of the best known in Madrid.