Calle Villa del Prado
Takes its name from Villa del Prado, a town in Madrid’s western sierra whose name comes from a meadow beside the castle of Alamín.
Calle Villa del Prado brings to the Delicias neighbourhood the name of a town in the west of the Madrid region, in the wine district of San Martín de Valdeiglesias, some seventy kilometres from the capital. It fits the logic of the Delicias street map, sown with names of villages and districts of the province.
The town dates back to the eleventh century, when a handful of houses grew on the lands of the castle of Alamín. The name is transparent: the settlement rose in a meadow (prado) near that fortress, and the name stuck. Its old quarter keeps coat-of-arms houses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries alongside a late Gothic church dedicated to Saint James.
Villa del Prado’s modern fame has to do with its market gardens. The quality of its vegetables earned it the nickname “the garden of Madrid”. That rural root now arrives reduced to a street name, among railway plots and residential blocks.