Calle del Teniente Coronel Noreña

Carlos Noreña Echevarría was born in Havana in 1889, when Cuba was still Spanish, and entered the Infantry Academy very young. He fought in Melilla, taught at the Higher School of War, and specialized in cartography: in the mid-1930s he led, on the Spanish side, the commission that fixed the boundaries of Ifni. His name reached the streets through the way he died. In July 1936, when the military uprising broke out, he refused to join the organization of the forces fighting against the Republic. He was arrested, locked in the Cárcel Modelo, and a people’s court sentenced him to death; he was shot in October 1936. Franco’s regime later adopted him as a martyr and ordered his name to head the roll of General Staff lieutenant colonels. In 1939 this street in Legazpi came to bear his name, erasing the earlier sign, dedicated to Matías Gómez Latorre, one of the founders of the PSOE.