Calle de Ruiz Palacios

Calle de Ruiz Palacios runs a little over two hundred meters in the Berruguete district, named with a surname that points to a person of whom no record survives. The registry lists the name, but not who he was or why the city chose to remember him here. The origin is undocumented. Berruguete grew at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth as an extension of Tetuán de las Victorias, the suburb formed north of Madrid after the troops returning from the African war camped in the nearby pastureland. It was a Madrid of low houses, dairies, and vegetable gardens, beyond the toll gate, where many streets opened fast and took the surname of an owner or a neighbor without the reason being recorded. Ruiz Palacios seems to belong to that category. Today it is a quiet street of plain doorways, with no plaque to explain the name.