Calle Julio López

The name belongs to a resident, not a notable. Julio López was one of the settlers of the Colonia Ibarrondo, the cluster of modest houses raised in Prosperidad over former orchards and melon fields. That farmland was parcelled out and the estate was built in the 1930s. Those who put up their own homes there earned a singular privilege: naming the streets they opened. So the estate’s streets bear the names of those settlers —⁠Martín Machío, Francisco Vivancos, Doña Carlota⁠— and, among them, Julio López. Of his life no record survives: no trade, no dates, no portrait. What remains is the name fixed on a plaque, that of the man who built his house in a working-class edge that then looked at Madrid from outside the city. Prosperidad arose in 1862 as a labourers' suburb. It is a short street that still names a man of whom nothing more is known except that he was here.