Calle del Guadiana

The name pays tribute to one of the great rivers of the Peninsula, the one that crosses La Mancha and Extremadura before marking the border with Portugal and emptying into the Atlantic. It fits the logic of the El Viso colony, built in the 1930s as a neighborhood of short streets with geographical names. The Guadiana carries a history that mixes geography and legend. The Romans called it Anas, and from the Arabic word wādī, “river,” placed before that ancient name came today’s Guadiana. The course has a trait that for centuries seemed miraculous: it sinks underground and reappears kilometers away, at the so-called Ojos del Guadiana. Cervantes captured that mystery in the episode of the cave of Montesinos. There the wizard Merlin holds Guadiana under a spell, a squire of Durandarte who out of sheer sorrow turns into a river and plunges underground in search of his master, surfacing here and there.