Calle de Sánchez Pacheco

The name points to a person, Sánchez Pacheco, two Castilian surnames strung together like so many others that were scattered across Madrid’s street map between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, yet the exact reason is not documented. There is no record of whether it recalls a landowner, a soldier, a local politician or one of the many figures the naming register posted without leaving a note of their lives. What is known of the ground is firmer. The street was born in the strip that was urbanised, plot by plot, from 1862, when rural owners began selling off their dry farmland north of the city, the seed of the Prosperidad district. Along here ran the mule-drawn tram that in 1893 linked Diego de León with Prosperidad, and near Sánchez Pacheco stood the depots where the cars were kept and the animals rested. When the line was electrified in the early 20th century, the old depots closed.