Calle Helecho

The street takes its name from the fern, one of the oldest plants to have grown on Earth. They appeared hundreds of millions of years ago, long before the dinosaurs. They bear neither flower nor seed: they reproduce by tiny spores kept under the leaves, in those aligned brown dots anyone has seen on lifting a frond. Why El Viso chose this name has not survived in any record. The street belongs to the fine grain of the neighbourhood, a landscaped estate laid out in the 1930s on the high ground north of the Castellana, with low houses and trees on both sides. Helecho fits the leafy air the neighbourhood cultivated from its origin as a garden city, at some seven hundred metres of altitude. The result is a brief street, barely eighty metres, almost a breath between blocks.