Calle Soria

Soria is one of the smallest and highest provincial capitals in Spain, set beside the Duero in the eastern reaches of Castile and León. A few kilometres away stand the ruins of Numancia, the Celtiberian city that resisted Rome for twenty years and fell by starvation in 133 BC. That memory weighed so heavily that in 1922 there was even a proposal to rename the whole province Numancia, though the idea came to nothing. Calle de Soria is a short street in the Las Acacias neighbourhood of Arganzuela, in a part of the Madrid street map where names of Spanish cities and provinces cluster together. There is no record of when or why this one was chosen. Soria stays tied to the Castilian landscape of moorlands, watchtowers and long winters that Antonio Machado walked and wrote about in Campos de Castilla during the years he lived in the city.