Calle Granjilla

The name refers to a small farm: granjilla is a diminutive of granja, taken from French grange, from Vulgar Latin granica (‘granary,’ from granum). As La Guindalera was developed from 1874, its streets often received names evoking the land’s earlier agricultural use. There is no documentary record of a specific estate called Granjilla in the area.

Before the Ensanche reached here, this was farmland. The La Guindalera neighbourhood grew out of the 1860 Castro Plan as market-garden soil, watered by the eastern irrigation channel. The first houses did not go up until 1874, and when the time came to name the new streets, many inherited the memory of the fields they had been. Granjilla is the diminutive of granja, a word Spanish took from the French grange. In old farming speech it named a small, modest holding. The place name crops up elsewhere in the region: the most famous is La Granjilla de La Fresneda, a royal estate beside the Monastery of El Escorial that Philip II had built between 1561 and 1569. The curious thing about the Madrid case is that no one has found the farm that would justify the name. Today the street keeps the echo of a market-garden hamlet of which nothing remains but the sign.

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