Calle del Porvenir

The street takes its name from the El Porvenir del Artesano housing cooperative, which in 1879 bought the surrounding land to build workers' homes beside the Camino de la Fuente del Berro. The City Council made the name official in 1887, confirming a usage already in place since the street opened.

The name of calle del Porvenir holds the memory of a workers‘ experiment. The El Porvenir del Artesano cooperative, founded in 1873 and organized into sections of some fifty members, bought land beside the Fuente del Berro in late 1879 so that each member, paying a weekly fee, could own a home. The first was finished in 1881 and the group reached about fifty houses. In 1887 the council made official a name already used in the neighborhood. At number 13 stood the J. G. Girod watch factory, opened in 1860, which by 1910 employed some two hundred workers. A fire destroyed it in 1912. No recognizable building survives from that workers’ quarter, and where the watchmaker’s stood there now rises a block of flats.

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