Calle Rodrigo Guevara

Before it bore a person’s name, this Embajadores street was named for a garden with a pond, poplars and willows, whose owner went by the nickname “el Chopa.” Hence the sign it carried for centuries: Calle de la Chopa. It runs between Santa Ana and Mira el Río Alta, barely sixty-odd meters. Répide painted it so narrow that only a bicycle could have fit through it. The present name comes from Rodrigo de Guevara, the gardener’s son. He is said to have met Miguel de Cervantes as a child in these parts, to have attended the town’s schools with him, and that Cervantes never left his side when he fell ill with smallpox. The story appears in no serious biography of Cervantes: it is a literary tradition of the neighborhood. The city fixed the name in 1961.