Calle de Rosario Romero

Who Rosario Romero was went unrecorded. The street registry places the street in the Almenara district and dates its naming to 1941, but lists it without data: neither her biography nor the reason for the dedication survives. Nor is there a record of whether she was a neighbor, an owner of the land, or a figure in some local episode. Almenara is the northernmost district of Tetuán, which grew north of Madrid from the second half of the nineteenth century. The core began with the camp of the army returning from the African war in 1860, around which merchants settled and, later, waves of workers. Many of those streets took the names of people linked to the plots or the neighborhood before municipal regularization. Rosario Romero may have taken hold that way, though the particular case is undocumented. The first name, Rosario, comes from the Latin rosarium, “rose garden,” and ended up naming the string of beads used to pray the Marian devotion: an object of devotion turned into a given name.