Calle del Jarama

The name comes from the Jarama, the river that runs through the Madrid region from north to south before giving its waters to the Tagus near Aranjuez. It rises in the Sierra de Ayllón and, over its nearly two hundred kilometers, takes in the Lozoya, the Manzanares, the Henares, and the Tajuña. It fits the logic of the El Viso colony, laid out by Rafael Bergamín in the 1930s, where many streets bear the names of Spanish rivers: Nervión, Sil, Tormes, Turia, Segre, Darro, Cinca. Walking through the neighborhood is like reading a river map of the peninsula. The river’s origin is disputed. The most widespread theory traces it to an Indo-European root tied to the idea of flowing; it already appears as Sarama in the Fuero de Madrid of 1202. The name carries echoes of the 20th century: the Battle of the Jarama, in the winter of 1937, and Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s novel El Jarama, which won the Premio Nadal in 1955.