Calle de Salamanca

When Cuatro Caminos was built up over the old pastureland of northern Madrid, its streets were laid out in a grid and given the names of Spanish provinces and cities. Salamanca thus entered the registry alongside Teruel, Ávila, Palencia, and Soria, a map of Spain drawn at sidewalk level. The Salamanca it evokes is the Castilian city on the banks of the Tormes, raised on the San Vicente hill some twenty-seven hundred years ago. There, in 1218, one of the oldest universities in Europe was founded, the one that earned it the nickname of the learned city. From its sandstone, golden at dusk, came the Plateresque facades that still define the old quarter. The city’s own name carries an unsolved riddle: the Greeks called it Helmantiké; Ptolemy, Salmantica; Livy and Plutarch, Hermandica. Best not to confuse it with the central Salamanca district, the marquis’s: here, in Tetuán, the name is pure geographical tribute overlooking the working-class grid of Cuatro Caminos.