Calle del Henares
It bears the name of the river Henares, the main tributary of the Jarama and the river of Alcalá, following El Viso’s habit of naming its streets after rivers of Spain.
The name comes from a river. The Henares rises in the Sierra Ministra, in Guadalajara, and flows into the Jarama, to which it brings the greatest volume of all its tributaries. Before it dies it waters Alcalá, the city that added its name to its own: Alcalá de Henares. The name is plain, the plural of henar, “a field grown with hay”; the river crossed meadowland and kept that name.
The street inherits the quarter’s pattern. When El Viso was developed in the 1930s on a high ridge east of the Castellana, its streets came to be named after rivers of the peninsula: Cinca, Segre, Darro, Tormes, Sil, Nervión. Calle del Henares is a short stretch, barely a hundred metres among white-façaded rationalist villas.