Calle Margaritas

The name comes from the flower, the daisy with white petals and a yellow heart that grows wild across the empty lots of Madrid. It commemorates no one: the residents themselves chose it, and only later did the authorities accept it as official. That popular christening shows how this edge of Tetuán grew, on its own terms and away from the centre. Calle Margaritas was not alone in its botanical whim. A few steps on it meets Calle de la Gloxinia, another street named for a flower, proof that a small garden of names was planted here when this land still began at the old Dehesa road and trailed off into open country. Today the countryside has vanished beneath the Berruguete neighbourhood. The street runs narrow and one-way, parallel to Calle de Villaamil, and ends in a cul-de-sac.