Calle Don Justo

The calle de Don Justo measures barely a few steps, in the Nueva España grid, within the old district of Chamartín de la Rosa that Madrid absorbed in 1948. The name keeps the title “Don” followed by the given name Justo, a formula that in old street registries usually marked a well-known resident or the owner of the land. Who that Justo was is undocumented. The area was built up in the early twentieth century as a succession of estates and land parcels over the old fields north of the city. Some of those streets took the name of the plot’s owner or its first inhabitant, without the reason ever being written down. Today it is a brief street between apartment blocks, with a plaque naming a Justo about whom only one thing is known: that someone, at some point, addressed him as Don.