Calle Tudelilla

Barely eighty meters are enough to name a whole village. Tudelilla recalls a town in southern La Rioja that answered to Arnedo until the late seventeenth century, when it declared itself an independent municipality. Today its inhabitants number fewer than five hundred. The village’s own name reads as a diminutive of Tudela, the great riverside city on the Ebro. Tudela comes from the Latin Tutela, the guardian deity of the Roman world, and Tudelilla would be the little one. The Bellas Vistas neighborhood grew in the early twentieth century as a working-class extension north of Cuatro Caminos, and many of its streets borrowed the names of towns from all over Spain. Why this Riojan village in particular was chosen, no record survives. The walker who covers these meters carries on the lips, without knowing it, the name of a hamlet in southern La Rioja.