Calle de Yuca

The name recalls the yucca, that desert-looking plant crowning a woody stem with a plume of long, stiff, pointed leaves. It reached European gardens from America and thrives effortlessly in courtyards and roundabouts, indifferent to cold and to forgotten watering. Behind the word lies a tangle: the Taíno of the Caribbean called the edible cassava root yuca, and when the name was later applied to a very different ornamental genus, the label got swapped. It is a short street in the residential grid east of the Paseo de la Castellana, bearing the name of a plant that came from another continent.