Calle de Turmalina

Tourmaline lends its name to this short street in the Delicias neighborhood, where it belongs to a mineral cluster: the surrounding streets bear names like Berilo, Circón, Cobre, Granito, Hierro, and Plomo. The choice fits the Madrid habit of naming whole areas by thematic families, and here the theme was mineralogy. The mineral owes its name to the Sinhalese touramalli, meaning something like “stones of mixed colors.” The description is exact: tourmaline changes hue depending on the chemical elements in its makeup, appearing in pink, green, blue, yellow, black, or in bands within a single crystal. It reached Europe from Ceylon, today’s Sri Lanka. It has an oddity worth telling the walker: when heated or put under pressure, tourmaline becomes electrified at its ends. Dutch jewelers of the 18th century saw that, held near the embers, the stone drew the ash toward it, and nicknamed it “the stone that pulls the ash.”