Calle Huelva

The street takes its name from Huelva, a city and province in the far south-west of Andalusia, facing the Atlantic between the marshes of the Tinto and the Odiel. It fits a Madrid custom: christening stretches of a neighbourhood with the names of Spanish provinces and cities. No documentary record survives of the exact reason Huelva was chosen for this street or of the date the name was imposed. The Prosperidad neighbourhood arose around 1862 as a working-class expansion of low houses, brick courtyards and dirt roads dotted with brickworks. The province that names Calle Huelva holds on its coast Palos de la Frontera, the port from which Christopher Columbus’s three vessels set sail on 3 August 1492.