Calle de Puigcerdá
The street takes its name from Puigcerdà, a town in the province of Girona and capital of the Cerdanya, set at 1,200 meters beside the river Segre on the French border. The Catalan place name joins puig (“hill,” from Latin podium) with cerdà (“of the Cerdanya”). Madrid’s City Council assigned the name on 25 September 1873, during the eastward growth of the Ensanche.
When Carlos María de Castro designed Madrid’s eastern Ensanche, he decided to name the cross streets of the Salamanca district after towns, provinces and regions from all over Spain. That is how this street arrived: a municipal ruling of 1873 gave it the name of a Pyrenean town, with no earlier name on record. Puigcerdà is today a dead-end that begins at calle de Jorge Juan, in the heart of Recoletos.
The real Puigcerdà was born around 1177 at the will of Alfonso II of Aragon, who moved the capital of the Cerdanya to a new settlement raised on the promontory that overlooks the plain. For centuries it was a contested border town between Spain and France. French troops took it in 1654, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees returned it to the Spanish Crown in 1659, though that same accord split the Cerdanya into two halves divided between the two powers.