Calle de Sagunto

The name travels to a hill in the Camp de Morvedre, north of Valencia, where Sagunto stands. There, in 219 BC, the people of ancient Arse-Saguntum endured an eight-month siege by Hannibal’s army before falling. That resistance, remembered as the prologue to the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, tied the place name to the idea of tenacity and earned it a spot on Madrid’s streets. The street belongs to the Trafalgar neighborhood, laid out in the late 19th century over the old outskirts of Chamberí. The neighborhood owes its name to the naval battle of 1805, and around it the register gathered the names of strongholds and battles. Nearby lies the Plaza de Olavide, the heart of the neighborhood, onto which Sagunto looks through the short Calle de Murillo, amid the market stalls and café terraces of this old-Madrid Chamberí.