Calle del Capitán Blanco Argibay

The whole neighborhood is called Valdeacederas, and this street bore that same name before it was built up: Valdeacederas named a stretch of farmland, recorded in documents before the area filled with houses. In 1949 the sign changed and the street came to recall a soldier. Ricardo Blanco Argibay was born in Chamartín de la Rosa in 1915 and died aged twenty-three at the Battle of the Ebro, in 1938, after joining the 1936 uprising and enlisting in the Legion. They nicknamed him “the soldier who prays”: the story goes that he escaped a night ambush because he had fallen asleep while praying, waking in time to warn his comrades. The original name still lives in the neighborhood, which is why residents and campaigners have asked to return to the street its old sign of Valdeacederas, the farmland that stood here before the buildings.