Calle Puente del Duero

The name draws a line to the Duero, the river that rises in the Picos de Urbión and crosses half the peninsula before surrendering to the Atlantic at Porto. The street belongs to a set of streets in El Viso labeled with Spanish river-names and landscapes: nearby run those of the Tormes, the Turia or the Serrano, in a neighborhood built as a residential colony between 1933 and 1936 on the old heights of the Castellana racecourse. The “bridge” of the title points to the structures that for centuries spanned the Duero, like the great bridge of Toro or the old stone bridge of Soria. No record survives that the name refers to a specific one: it fits the logic of the colony’s streets, which preferred geography to people’s names and wove a small river map among rationalist villas. Today the neighborhood ranks among the most expensive in the capital, and the walker who reads the plaque crosses, with no water underfoot, a bridge that exists only in the name.