Calle de Serrallo

The name comes from the African front. In the autumn of 1859, in the first fighting of the War of Africa, Spanish forces secured on the outskirts of Ceuta an old abandoned palace known as El Serrallo. There they fortified the camp from which the army would set out for Tetuán. The word serrallo comes from the Italian serraglio, which in turn draws from Persian by way of Turkish: it named the sultan’s palace and, by extension, the harem. It is no accident that Serrallo falls in Tetuán. The district was born when the soldiers returning from that campaign, in 1860, raised their settlement north of the city and named it Tetuán de las Victorias. The neighbourhood’s street map works as a map of the war: the names of squares, battles and positions in Morocco scattered among the blocks of Berruguete. A short street, barely 175 metres, that holds the name of a palace turned barracks.