Calle del Torpedero Tucumán
Honors the Argentine ship ARA Tucumán, which between 1936 and 1937 evacuated more than a thousand refugees of the Spanish Civil War by sea.
The name evokes a warship that crossed the Atlantic to get people out of Spain. The ARA Tucumán was a destroyer of the Argentine Navy, launched in England in 1928: a hundred-meter hull, 120-millimeter guns and torpedo tubes, which is where the “torpedo boat” tag comes from.
Its fame did not come from its weapons. Between November 1936 and June 1937 it made twelve crossings from Valencia and Alicante and took aboard more than twelve hundred people fleeing repression behind Republican lines. Among the evacuees were the legendary goalkeeper Ricardo Zamora, freed from the Cárcel Modelo thanks to the Argentine embassy, and Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law.
The city named the street in 1962, the same year the ship was decommissioned and scrapped.