Calle del Rodio

Rhodium gives this street its name: a noble, silvery, exceedingly rare metal of the platinum group, which the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston isolated around 1804 while working with platinum ore brought from South America. He named it from the Greek rhódon, “rose,” for the pinkish tone of the salts he obtained. Today this scarce metal lives mostly beneath cars, in the catalytic converters that clean exhaust gases. The street belongs to the so-called Metals neighborhood, a grid in southeastern Arganzuela where the streets were named in a series after metals and minerals. A few steps away run Calle del Plomo, Calle del Zinc, and Calle del Hierro, a set consistent with the industrial fate the Castro Plan of 1860 reserved for this strip beside the railway. Where machines, boilers, and even a printing press once sounded, blocks of housing and neighborhood restaurants now line up. The visitor walking down Rodio treads a periodic table drawn across the asphalt of Legazpi.