Calle Irati
Bears the name of the Irati, a Navarrese river that rises in the Pyrenees and gives its name to the beech forest around it.
The Irati that names this street comes down from the Navarrese Pyrenees. It rises at some 2,000 metres, near the Orhi peak, and runs close to ninety kilometres between the valleys of Aezkoa and Salazar before wedging into the Foz de Lumbier and yielding its waters to the Aragón.
The name travels from Navarre to this corner of El Viso, where several nearby streets also bear the names of Spanish rivers. Irati shares its neighbourhood with Arga, Genil, Sil and Leizarán, a river geography traced over the plan of a 1930s neighbourhood.
The Irati’s fame lies not in its flow but in the forest it crosses. The Selva de Irati is the second largest beech-and-fir wood in Europe, behind only the German Black Forest: more than seventeen thousand hectares of beech and silver fir that in autumn set the slopes ablaze with copper and gold.