Calle Mejorada del Campo

The name comes from Mejorada del Campo, a town on the Henares corridor, east of Madrid, where the Jarama and Henares rivers meet. Calle Mejorada del Campo belongs to a cluster of Delicias streets named after towns in the province, a criterion that arranged this part of the neighborhood’s street map by geography. The Mejorada that names the street has roots in the twelfth century. Around 1150 Alfonso VII granted the place to the bishop of Segovia, who resettled it. In the late thirteenth century the residents bought from the bishops their right to self-government and passed to the Crown; Philip II declared it a royal town in 1593. The town holds a singular structure: the cathedral that Justo Gallego built by hand for more than half a century with bricks, drums and recycled materials, without plans or permits, until his death in his nineties.