Calle del Roncal

The name travels from the Navarrese Pyrenees to Chamartín. The Roncal is a valley crossed by the Esca river, beside the French border, and its name joined the repertoire of rivers and regions used to sign the streets of El Viso. The colony, designed by Rafael Bergamín between 1933 and 1936 as a cooperative of low-cost housing and soon turned into a well-off neighborhood, arranged its streets with place names of waters and valleys: Arga, Nervión, Sil, Tormes, Turia… and this Roncal, a brief stretch of barely fifty meters. The valley that lends the name holds greater stories than the street. There, every 13 July, the Tribute of the Three Cows is paid, a grazing agreement sealed in 1375 with the neighboring Béarn valley of Barétous and held to be the oldest living international treaty in Europe. From those same mountains came Roncal cheese, the first Spanish cheese with a designation of origin, and the tenor Julián Gayarre.