Calle Nestares
It takes its name from Nestares, a village in the Cameros range of La Rioja, whose place-name means “place of broom shrubs.”
The name comes from the north. Nestares is a hamlet in the Tierra de Cameros, in La Rioja, perched above eight hundred meters beside the river Iregua, today with a few dozen residents. Its place-name comes from the Latin genista, broom, and describes what once covered those slopes: a “place abundant in broom.”
Juan Ramón Jiménez’s paternal family came from Nestares and settled in Moguer, in Huelva. From that Riojan line was born the poet, Nobel laureate in Literature in 1956, so a hamlet of broom shrubs stands at the origin of one of the great names of Spanish poetry.
The town council left no written explanation, though the place-name and its meaning are well documented. Calle de Nestares runs barely a hundred and fifty meters between housing blocks south of Legazpi, far from any slope and any broom, faithful only to the name of a village that smelled of yellow flowers.