Calle Villafranca
The name points to the place name “Villafranca”, found in at least thirteen Spanish towns. The street follows the pattern of the nineteenth-century Guindalera, whose roads took the names of towns, though no source identifies which one this refers to.
In the late nineteenth century, on Madrid’s eastern outskirts beyond the perimeter drawn by the 1860 Castro Plan, the Guindalera neighbourhood grew up. By 1888 it held 762 people, and streets like Ardemans, Béjar and Cartagena already had names: Spanish place names threaded with the surnames of local owners and figures. Calle Villafranca breathes that same geographical air.
The name comes from the medieval Latin villa franca. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, lords and councils founded towns so named to draw in settlers in exchange for tax exemptions. The lure worked across the peninsula: there are Villafrancas in León, Badajoz, Córdoba, Navarre and Catalonia, among many more. Which of them lends its name to this Madrid street is still unknown.