Calle de Rosa Jardón

“Rosa Jardón” is a person’s name: Rosa as the given name, Jardón as the surname, of Galician root. It does not refer to the flower, as the word “rosa” alone might suggest. The street belongs to the Nueva España district, in Chamartín, one of the layouts ordered and named when the old municipality of Chamartín de la Rosa was absorbed by Madrid in the mid-20th century. That reorganisation produced dozens of new streets that had to be christened. Whom this name remembers has gone unrecorded. No record survives of who Rosa Jardón was or why the street was dedicated to her. What is on record is the street’s present. It gathers several schools and has a distinctly scholastic character, with pupils and families coming and going. For years it was a stretch of bare earth that flooded in the rain and hindered anyone on foot. A recent overhaul turned it into an accessible single-level surface, with new paving, lighting and some thirty trees — maples and magnolias — planted along its length.