Calle del Ega
Takes its name from the Ega, a river of the northern peninsula and tributary of the Ebro, within El Viso’s network of streets named after rivers.
The name comes from a river. The Ega rises in Álava, on the slopes of the Sierra de Cantabria, and runs just over a hundred kilometers before giving its waters to the Ebro in southern Navarre. Along the way it wraps around Estella in a bend so tight the town earned the nickname of the city of the Ega.
That this river names a Madrid street makes sense once you look around. The El Viso colony, built in the 1930s on the heights at the end of Serrano, named much of its layout after peninsular rivers. A few steps away run the Arga, the Sil, the Tormes, the Turia, and the Nervión. Ega joined that roll call of waters as a short street, barely a hundred meters, among the cubic, pale-fronted houses designed by Rafael Bergamín.
So, in one of the city’s costliest neighborhoods, the walker finds the echo of a short northern river that almost no one links to Madrid, written on a plaque far from its bed.