Calle Francisco Balseiro

The name commemorates a Francisco Balseiro, but his identity is undocumented. No reliable record survives of who he was or why Madrid dedicated this short street in the small streetscape of Bellas Vistas to him; here the origin has been lost. What does have history is the ground it treads. Bellas Vistas grew in the late nineteenth century west of the old road to France, today Bravo Murillo, as one of the shanty fringes that rose north of Madrid without a plan or a sewer. The barrio’s name promised exactly that, fine views: from those heights one commanded the city before the buildings covered everything. Its fabric filled with narrow streets bearing saints and stray surnames, and Francisco Balseiro is one of them: a proper name that time left without a biography.