Calle del Refugio

The name says what it seems: a refuge, a place to shelter. Who or what inspired it here, on this short stretch between Ciudad Jardín and Prosperidad, is not recorded. The colonies of low-cost housing that occupied this land in the early 20th century spread their streets among the names of trades, of people and of flowers, and among that modest signage there remained a Refugio whose reason no one wrote down. The word carries centuries of Madrid charity. In Habsburg Madrid there was the Brotherhood of the Refuge, which around 1618 obtained a legal charter to gather the poor and sick at night and hand out bread to those without it. That institution, which still exists, has no proven link to this street, but it helps explain why the term rang of shelter. No census or municipal record clarifies whether behind the sign there stood an asylum, a chapel, or only the wish to evoke shelter. It is a short stretch of roadway, with a reason that was never written down.