Calle del Guadalquivir

The name comes from the Guadalquivir, the river that crosses Andalusia from Cazorla to the Atlantic and the only navigable one in Spain, able to carry ships inland as far as Seville. Its name comes from the Andalusi Arabic wād al-kabír, “the great river,” the form used in al-Ándalus for the channel the Romans had known as the Baetis. The street belongs to a group of El Viso streets named after Spanish rivers: nearby run the Nervión, Sil, Tormes, Turia, and Arga. The quarter was born in the 1930s as an estate of rationalist villas designed by Rafael Bergamín, a garden city of white façades and clean volumes raised at the far end of Serrano, then almost open country.