Calle Teresa López Valcárcel
Remembers the owner of the land the street was laid across, named in 1934.
In 1934 the council opened and named this street in southern Arganzuela the way it named so many others on the edges of Madrid: after the woman who owned the land it would run across. Nothing else survives of Teresa López Valcárcel — no dates, no trade, no portrait. All that is known is that she held the land in a Madrid growing towards the Manzanares and needing names for its plots.
Hers is not the only case. Several streets in this strip of Arganzuela and neighbouring Usera bear the names of women tied to the ownership of land parcelled out in the thirties, such as Candelaria Mora or Gumersinda Rosillo.
Today it is some three hundred and fifty metres of asphalt between apartment blocks, near Legazpi, keeping the surname of an owner whose first name is almost all that remains.