Calle Leganés
Takes its name from Leganés, the neighboring town south of Madrid whose place name springs from mud, the silt of an old lagoon.
Calle de Leganés recalls the town of the same name, today one of the great cities of southern Madrid and once a village of waterlogged fields. The naming fits the custom of this corner of Arganzuela, where several streets carry the names of the towns of the district.
The place name Leganés holds the memory of mud. It derives from légamo or légano, the sticky silt of tilled land, in reference to a lagoon that filled the spot before it was drained for farming. A sixteenth-century account tells it plainly: where the town was founded there was a lagoon with much silt, and from that came Legamar, which use wore down to Leganés.
The Madrid street keeps, in four syllables, the memory of that dried-up lagoon.