Calle Fuente del Saz

In a neighborhood dedicated to the Americas, this street looks inward: it bears the name of Fuente el Saz de Jarama, a municipality some thirty kilometers northeast of Madrid, in the middle basin of the Jarama. The Hispanoamérica street registry is full of capitals from across the Atlantic, and among them slip a handful of streets recalling towns of the region itself. The place name holds a small rural scene. Saz is an old Castilian form for sauce, willow, from the Latin salice, and the whole describes a spring beside which a fine willow grew. The story goes that a large tree of that kind sprang up beside a spring and that the town took shape around that point of water. The tag “de Jarama” was added later to tell it apart from other places of similar name. In the sign of Fuente del Saz survives, reduced to two words, that spring with its willow.