Calle del Sorgo

Sorghum is a robust cereal, a close relative of maize in its bearing, able to raise stalks up to three meters and to withstand drought like few grains. It was born in tropical Africa, where it was domesticated millennia ago between present-day Sudan and Ethiopia, and from there it traveled through Asia and the Mediterranean as bread, fodder, beer, and even raw material for brooms. The name holds a geographic misunderstanding centuries old. The word sorgo reached Spanish through Italian, which inherited it from the Latin Syricum granum, “grain of Syria”: the Romans knew the plant through that eastern region and named it as if it came from there, when its true cradle lay much farther south. Calle del Sorgo belongs to the urban herbarium of Valdeacederas, whose nearby streets parade like a garden catalog: Ágave, Veza, Aligustre, Plátano. Much of this plant toponymy landed in the street plan in the mid-twentieth century, when Madrid absorbed Chamartín de la Rosa and had to rename the streets that repeated names.