Calle del Arroyo
It recalls the streams that ran down the Valdeacederas valley, where the vegetable plots were watered before the neighbourhood was built up.
Before the low houses and empty lots peopled this corner of Tetuán, water ran through the Valdeacederas valley. The neighbourhood’s own place name, “valley of the sorrels,” marks a damp hollow where that sour-leaved herb grew and where several streams descended from the old road to France toward the low ground. Along their banks settled day labourers and migrants who worked the plots watered by those currents.
Calle del Arroyo keeps the memory of that watery landscape. The name describes what was there, not a person or an event: a watercourse, now vanished under the asphalt, like so many Madrid streams that the city piped away and forgot. No record survives that it recalls a particular named stream.
Anyone walking these two hundred and thirty-seven metres today treads the dry bed of a water that gave the plots their drink and gave the street its name.