Calle Membrillo
It takes its name from the quince, a fruit tree with golden, aromatic fruit, among a group of streets in the barrio de Castilla named after trees.
The quince gives its name to Calle Membrillo, a short stretch of the barrio de Castilla. It is a small tree that sheds its leaves in autumn and, at the end of summer, bears a yellow, deeply fragrant fruit. The word comes from the Greek melímelon, “honey apple,” for that dense aroma it gives off as it ripens, though its hard flesh is rarely eaten raw and almost always ends up as a sweet paste.
The name fits a Madrid custom of dedicating stretches of street to trees and fruit; nearby runs Calle Níspero. No record survives of any specific dedication to explain why the quince was chosen for this point of Chamartín.
The tree arrived millennia ago from the Caucasus, and the Greeks and Romans made it a symbol of fertility: a bride was offered a quince on her wedding day and, so it was told, had to bite it to perfume her kisses. Of that fruit of ancient weddings there remains today a sign of less than a hundred meters that smells of autumn.