Calle Pedro Tezano

Calle de Pedro Tezano is a short, straight stretch among low houses in the Berruguete neighborhood of Tetuán. It bears the name of a man of whom barely a trace remains: no reliable record survives of who he was or why Madrid chose to remember him here. His trade, his era and his merit are undocumented. The void suits the ground it treads. The area formed as a shantytown north of Madrid, when Tetuán de las Victorias was still a hamlet thrown up quickly by day laborers and migrants. Many of its streets were named without ceremony, and some of those names have reached us with their origin already erased. The surname recalls the Tezanos of Cantabria, though that closeness is not enough to attribute the street to any one of them.