Calle Panizo

Millet is a humble grass, Setaria italica, with tall stalks and a tight, fox-tail-shaped ear. Its small golden grain fed the Iberian fields from prehistoric times, boiled into porridge or ground for coarse bread. The word carried a famous confusion. When the first navigators brought back unfamiliar cobs from the Americas, they named them “panizo” for the resemblance, and in Andalusia and the Canary Islands the word stuck to maize. A single word ended up naming two plants an ocean apart. No record survives of the exact reason for the name in the Berruguete neighborhood. It fits, in any case, the vein of field and plant names that runs through this part of Tetuán.