Calle de Reyes Aizquíbel

This street in Valdeacederas, in Tetuán, bears a name of which barely a trace survives. Reyes Aizquíbel must have been a person —⁠the given name points to a woman⁠— but there is no record of who she was or why the street was dedicated to her. The surname does speak. Aizquíbel belongs to Basque naming, built on aitz, “crag,” and gibel, “back part”: a spot “behind the rock,” one of the many farmsteads that took their name from the terrain. A nineteenth-century lexicographer of Basque bore that same surname, though nothing links him to the street. The layout arose with the working-class expansion of Tetuán de las Victorias, the district built at the end of the nineteenth century north of Madrid, where streets opened fast and names were assigned without a record always surviving. Today its barely two hundred meters form part of the grid that the Paseo de la Dirección plan gradually reshaped.