Calle de Villoslada

The name points to Villoslada de Cameros, a town in La Rioja perched on the northern slope of the Sierra de Cebollera, in the upper Iregua valley. The place name joins villa with a second element of undocumented origin; its form already appears fixed in 1366, when the place is listed among the towns Henry II of Trastámara handed to Pedro Manrique. The town lived on wool. In the mid-19th century it held around fourteen hundred inhabitants and had forty cloth looms, and it is said its young men were exempted from conscription so as not to leave the mills untended. The calle de Villoslada runs through the Imperial neighborhood, in Arganzuela, beside the paseo Imperial, one of the old Baroque tree-lined walks that descended toward the Manzanares and that time turned into a factory zone, crossed by the railway, with that goods station the locals nicknamed “the flea station.”